Ian Kinsler's Power Outage

Ian Kinsler has yet to hit a home run this year.  He is one of 10 regular players to have 0 home runs so far this year.  Last year he hit 17 home runs in 726 plate appearances, or about once every 42.7 plate appearances.  This means that he should already have about 5 home runs this year at that same pace.  The last time Kinsler hit a home run was on the last day of the season in 2014 off of Kyle Gibson in the 3rd inning.  He had 2 more plate appearances after that, therefore he has gone 215 plate appearances without homering.  By my count, this is the longest home run drought by Kinsler; last year Kinsler went 196 plate appearances between homering.  However, the difference is that this time it's not hurting his overall offensive production.

Longest HR drought in Kinsler's career:

Year	Dates between homering	PA	AVG	OBP	SLG	OPS
2015	4/6 - 5/28	213	0.278	0.357	0.364	0.720
2014	7/4 - 8/21	192	0.232	0.258	0.287	0.545
2010	5/19 - 6/25	143	0.264	0.338	0.304	0.642
2008	6/6 - 8/9	140	0.270	0.331	0.357	0.688
2011	4/23 - 5/25	134	0.243	0.333	0.330	0.664
2012	4/25 - 5/26	134	0.287	0.343	0.361	0.704

*May not reflect actual number of plate appearances between homering due to extra plate appearances in homering game.

Kinsler's current home run drought has produced the highest OPS than any of his other home run droughts and is only the 2nd time that it is above .700.  His slugging percentage is also the highest, but the biggest difference is the on-base percentage.  After having a pathetic 4% walk rate last year, it's back up to a very good 11.3% this year.  

This change in approach has not effected his overall offensive contribution; he's still on pace for about the same league adjusted numbers that he put up over the last few seasons:

	wOBA	wRC+
2012	0.327	100
2013	0.334	105
2014	0.319	102
2015	0.322	104

In fact, Kinsler's .720 OPS is only 7 points lower than what he put up all of last year.  

Other than walking more, there are other signs of a change in approach in his stats.  His fly ball percentage is the lowest of his career while his line drive rate is up 3.7 percent from last year.  This could be a conscious effort to strip away the "Captain Pop-Up" nickname as his infield fly ball rate is down from 11.9% last year to 8.5% this year.  Of course less fly balls mean less chances for home runs.  

 Ian Kinsler has always been somewhat of a streaky hitter.  In the 2nd half of last year he only hit .239/.270/.357.  If this current stretch is the down side of his streaky-ness this year, then we can look forward to his numbers when he does start hitting home runs again.