So what has happened recently and is happening currently is less relevant than what's happened in the past? Young himself once stole 27 and 28 bags in a year, does that make him a viable threat to run now? This is the Joe Kelly argument all over again, where career stats don't tell the story of the player we have our hands on at this exact moment in time.
A tiny sample of recent performance, especially with something as notoriously unstable as platoon splits, is far and away less useful than career performance. Note that a PA last week is not considered to be
less useful than a PA three years ago. PA by PA they are equal, the more recent PAs should probably be given
slightly more weight. But 1400 PAs beats the hell out of 180 in almost any context, especially this one.
I actually made a rather glaring error in the quoted post, and I appreciate the opportunity to correct it here.
The Book (Tango/MGL/Andy Dolphin) found that if you want to estimate the platoon skill of a right handed batter, you should regress his demonstrated platoon split by adding 2,200 PAs of league average
splits against lefties. Young only has 1417 PAs against lefties, so his splits should still be regressed back to league average by roughly 60%.
If you really want to use more recent splits you certainly can, but remember that regression is not optional when trying to get something useful out of them. I say samples that small are useless because they basically disappear in an analysis like this one.
Young, for his career, is a 95 wRC+ hitter. Fangraphs weighted ZiPS/Steamer projections (which do take his recent performance into account) believe he is a true talent 92 wRC+ hitter. These seem close enough that we can work from his career platoon numbers without significant adjustment. After all, Chris young is still the right handed fly ball oriented pull hitter he has been pretty much his entire career. There is very little reason to think his true talent platoon splits have changed.
An average right handed hitter has a ~ 5% wOBA platoon split gap. Young's 122 and 83 wRC+ splits translate to 2016 wOBAs of 0.386 and 0.262, a 0.124 point (41%) platoon split gap. A weighted average of these gives us an expected platoon split gap of 19%, and projected split wRC+s of approximately 107 and 89.
Barring a stupid math error on my part, it seems pretty clear that Chris Young is a bad but useable hitter against right handed pitching. He is certainly far better than Josh Rutledge.