The St. Louis Cardinals and Buster Olneys’ Crush Quotient

How do the St. Louis Cardinals stack up in a new measure of offensive acumen?

Earlier this week, Buster Olney unveiled his statistic which he believes encompasses plate discipline and just how effective a player is at the plate. There are a number of swing and miss profiles available currently, but nothing that necessarily looks at how effective those swings turn out to be.

The statistic itself has been named the “Crush Quotient,” and quite simply is total bases divided by the number of swings a hitter takes. This makes up for some of the lacking elements in statistics like batting average which don’t show the acute nature of plate discipline within them.

Although simplistic, if we look at the top performers of 2020 by Crush Quotient it paints a very intruiging picture of how effective this stat could be as flagged by Buster in his article:

If we compare this list to offensive WAR per Fangraphs from 2020, we see that four of these five players sat within the top 14 players per fWAR. This would contain all five players if Wil Myers could have improved defensively in 2020. We’re looking at a pretty effective statistic out of the gates for offensive performance.

Based on these key bats, what it shows well is: if you’re a top performer and likely to see very few pitches to hit in the strike zone, you need to do damage when you do get them!

A prime example from the St. Louis Cardinals is Paul Goldschmidt who was walked a team-high 37 times in 2020. This was the eighth-most in the National League last year and shows Goldy needed to make the most of those pitches he did swing at!

Looking firstly at 2020, the top St. Louis Cardinals performers by Crush Quotient were:

1. Brad Miller – 22.9 CQ
2. Paul Goldschmidt – 22.5 CQ
3. Harrison Bader – 21.5 CQ
4. Tommy Edman – 20.1 CQ
5. Dylan Carlson – 19.9 CQ

To put that into scale of the league, of the 282 players who saw at least 200 pitches both Goldy and Brad Miller ranked in the top third by Crush Quotient. The Cards worst performer, Matt Carpenter, was in the bottom decile of the entire league with a 15.3 CQ that was worse than the likes of Chance Sisco and Shed Long.

This reflects what a lot of us already know. Paul Goldschmidt showed great ownership of the zone and made a significant impact on a per-swing basis within the Cards lineup. Kolten Wong on the other hand, who has since joined the Milwaukee Brewers, was one of the Cardinals’ worst performer per Crush Quotient (16.2) which was in the bottom 11% of the league. This shows that although he may be a defensive master, his bat just wasn’t strong enough for what this lineup needs and perhaps for the AAV he was looking for in free agency.

Another interesting outcome from digging into Crush Quotient was the performance of Lane Thomas. When looking at CQ over the last three seasons, specifically of hitters who’ve seen at least 300 pitches, Thomas ranked in the top four percent of all hitters. This 25.9 Crush Quotient was better than MLB star performers like Trevor Story, Matt Chapman and Jose Altuve! Obviously this is a small sample size, but it’s certainly an exciting outcome and hopefully something Thomas can push forwards with in 2021 when he can kick on!

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Finally lets look at the Redbirds’ newest and biggest recent acquisition, Nolan Arenado. Over the last three years during his time with the Rockies, Nado sits in the ten best hitters with at least 5,500 pitches seen per Crush Quotient (26.4). This is right up there with the best in the game and that’s even including his below-par 2020 season! If Arenado can continue or even improve this performance in his first season with the Redbirds, the Cards could have found that offensive firework they’ve been longing for over the last few years.

Overall, an interesting new stat and excellent to see certain players performing so positively with it. Though with no St. Louis Cardinals players sitting in the top quartile of the league in 2020 there is absolutely improvement that can be made within the Cards offense. Something perhaps for Jeff Albert to concentrate on with the hitters in these final weeks of Spring.

It’ll be fascinated to see how the likes of Lane Thomas and Dylan Carlson can perform this year with a full 162 game season and how their Crush Quotient turns out. Plus whether Nolan Arenado can keep up his strong career numbers, 26.2 CQ, which sits him only 13 players behind Mike Trout on the career Crush Quotient leaderboard!