Quick hits: Rare Nick Markakis home runs

This one is actually going to be quick, I promise. (Don’t believe me.)

Nick Markakis on quite a tear to begin 2019! Here are some facts:

• His 148 wRC+ is the highest he’s ever posted in a single season. Yes, even higher than his 6-win 2008 season, where it was 138. Now, that’s not to say he’s going to finish the year with this mark, but ragging on him got us this far, so, well, yeah...
• His slugging percentage is currently 20 percent above league average, which is also the highest single-season mark he’s posted. As a Brave, his highest slugging-relative-to-league (SLG+) was 105, i.e, five percent above league average. That mark’s being blown out of the water.
• ISO is basically just slugging minus batting average. It’s not useful as a judge of player value in a vacuum, it’s just a fun way to describe how reflective a guy’s results are of in-game power. Because he’s still hitting a ton of singles, Markakis doesn’t have a particularly high ISO, relative to league average (ISO+): it’s just 102, or two percent above league average. But, it’s the first time he’s done that since 2012. Even last year, during the Markakassaince, his ISO+ was just 87.

So, all of these things are rare finds, and that’s cool. But there are some things that are even rarer than all this.

Rare Markakis Homer Thing #1: Back-to-back games with homers

Markakis has homered in each of his past two games. He also homered in back-to-back games in mid-April, against the Mets. That’s hardly been a common occurrence for him. Since coming over to Atlanta, he’s only done it twice before this year — once in 2016 (including a two-homer game) and once in 2018. The last time he had multiple back-to-back homer games was 2014, when he did it three times.

It’s not even halfway through May, and he’s already done it twice. What’s actually kind of amazing is that he hasn’t homered outside of those stretches, as those four dingers are his season total.

Rare Markakis Homer Thing #2: The lofted one

On Sunday afternoon, Markakis did a pretty weird thing:

Can you tell what’s weird about it? (For one, it’s like the least prototypical Markakis swing to me.) This homer was lofted out of the park at a launch angle of 38 degrees. Across the majors so far this year, there have been 104 such homers (around eight percent of all homers).

In the Statcast era (so, going back to 2015), Markakis has hit just three homers like this one. One came in 2016, one last year, and now he has one this year. If he hits another, it’ll be the most lofted homers he’s hit in a Braves uniform in a single year. (As a bonus, the one he hit in 2018 also came against the Marlins, but in Atlanta. The one he hit in 2016 came off Chris Sale (!). The one against the Marlins from last year is below, because it cracks me up; you almost never see Markakis take an obliteration-focused swing like that, and he actually probably hit it too high for its distance and the moisture-laden air, but it cleared the short porch anyway.)

Rare Markakis Homer Thing #3: The oppo one

So, this is a little cheating, because what Markakis did last night (below) wasn’t technically “oppo.” It had a radial launch angle of -4 degrees (zero is right back up the middle), so it’s only “very very slightly to the opposite field.” But, it’s still very rare! If you only count legitimate opposite-field homers, Markakis only has three in the Statcast era, and none this year. But, if you change the criteria to -4 degrees or further towards left field, you get this one.

Anyway, you can guess where this is going. Markakis had an opposite-field homer (one) in 2016 (off Aaron Nola). He had an opposite-field homer (one) in 2017 (off Stephen Strasburg). He had an opposite-field homer (one) in 2018 (off Sal Romano, whoever that is). And now, in 2019, he has (kinda) one already. Woo?

The above is the most oppo homer Markakis has hit as a Brave.

See, I told you it’d be quick.