Advanced stats from 2021 that matter for St. Louis Cardinals

Tyler O’Neill’s xwOBAcon (.550)

There are so many exciting underlying stats from Tyler O’Neill’s breakout 2021 season, but let’s just focus on one that sounds the silliest. xwOBAcon sounds complex, but if you understand wOBA, it is a couple of short jumps of understanding from there. From wOBA, you can understand that there is a calculated expected value for wOBA (which is xwOBA), and then you can isolate just the calculated xwOBA on contact (finally xwOBAcon).

As a sabermetric tool, it’s basically a way to measure how good a hitter was expected to be on balls that he made contact with. For Tyler O’Neill, this is important for a couple of reasons. First, Tyler O’Neill, in spite of his breakout .912 OPS and top-8 MVP finish in 2021, still strikes out a lot.

In fact, the biggest predictor of his breakout, his improved plate discipline in 2020, slid backward and his strikeout rate was in the bottom 4% of the league. However, when O’Neill does make contact, he does it really, really well. O’Neill’s .550 xwOBAcon was top 6% in the MLB in 2021 and confirms what I just said: when he made contact, it was expected that things would go pretty well for O’Neill.

I could’ve pointed to xSLG (which he underperformed in reality) or barrel% or any number of other advanced stats to argue that O’Neill’s breakout was no fluke, but his xwOBAcon was too fun to pass up pointing out. The real question moving forward is whether or not that strikeout rate will catch up to him, but if he keeps making the same quality of contact, there is nothing to worry about.