2012 opened with very high hopes for Royals’ 1B Eric Hosmer. He was coming off a solid four month debut in 2011 and had a monster spring training. Scouts in ST said he looked as good as anyone in baseball at the plate in March.

Hosmer was one of the breakout candidates in baseball in 2012, but that didn’t happen. I was among the fans of Hosmer who saw big things in 2012 and put my money where my mouth was, drafting him 66^th overall in my fantasy baseball league, right about where Yahoo! had him ranked. He finished in the 340s.

But we all know that fantasy baseball stats don’t reflect a player’s true performance, so that isn’t enough to tell us Hosmer disappointed. But he did. He posted a -1.1 WAR in 2012 which was among the ten worst in all of baseball among qualified hitters.

Hosmer, the future star, played like Michael Young and Brennan Boesch according to WAR and traditional fantasy stats. Or did he?

I went inside the numbers, and I have no idea what to think. He posted a 1.6 WAR in 2011 in about 75% of a season, so let’s call it a baseline of 2.2 WAR. We would expect him to improve in his second season, so let’s say we’d expect him to put up a 3.0 WAR in 2012.

His true WAR was 4.1 wins below that number. That’s pretty substantial. Let’s try to explain why.

First, UZR doesn’t like his defense (although many expect him to be a top tier gloveman), but it didn’t like his defense much last year. That accounts for maybe 0.5 WAR of the difference.

Hosmer walked more in 2012, but also struckout a bit more. The slash line dropped across the board. The average dropped 60 points, OBP by 30, SLG by more than 100. His BABIP also fell by more than 60 points.

So this would seem to indicate he was making the same amount or more contact, but the contact he was making was substantially worse. Is that true?

His line drive rate is the same and he’s traded 4% of his flyballs for groundballs, but that can’t be it. He hit fewer infield popups. He swung at fewer pitches outside the strikezone.

What happened to Eric Hosmer?

Two explanations emerge. First, Hosmer is hitting the ball just as squarely, but is doing so with substantially less force. I would think that this would result in more popups and fewer line drives, but it’s possible that it doesn’t. Maybe, Hosmer lost power despite getting a year older and a year better.

Or maybe he was extremely unlucky. Maybe he was so unlucky we can’t even believe it. His BABIP dropped dramatically, which is an indicator of luck. But there is skill inside BABIP, maybe that skill deteriorated. We generally think as sample size increases, luck tends to balance out.

But we also know that BABIP takes three years to balance out to the real value. What if Hosmer had the unluckiest of seasons?

It seems unlikely, but we would expect that over the course of many seasons, one player would stand out as supremely unlucky over the course of a season. Wouldn’t simple randomness lead us to at least one strange outlier?

That’s my take. I don’t really know what happened to Eric Hosmer in 2012, but I have images of the 2011 version of him mashing baseballs with tenacity, so I’m not so sure I know what else to think.

Maybe 2013 will provide us with answers. But for now, I’m calling Eric Hosmer’s 2012 season the Unluckiest of All.