Andie Anderson wants to do serious journalism, but instead she’s stuck writing how-to columns for a women’s lifestyle magazine. The 2003 feature film, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, follows Andie (played by Kate Hudson) as she attempts to demonstrate that even a conventionally attractive straight woman will find herself single in a hot minute if she commits all the common faux pas known to drive straight men away. The subject of her journalistic experiment is Benjamin Barry (played by Matthew McConaughey), who coincidentally is running an experiment of his own. He claims to have a foolproof formula to make any woman fall in love with him in 10 days flat. The premises of both endeavors rely heavily on traditional gender stereotypes, but eventually the pair realize their situation is more nuanced, both in terms of the circumstances and the individuals involved (or at least as nuanced as a movie that came out in 2003 can muster).
Here in 2024, Kevin Brown recently noted on a MASN broadcast that Orioles shortstop Gunnar Henderson had grounded into only two double plays all season. That felt startlingly low for a roughly 150-game sample, but I’ll admit to not habitually tracking the GIDP leaderboard. What is a “good” number of GIDP for a full season? Has anyone ever posted a perfect, no-GIDP season? What makes players particularly good or bad at avoiding GIDP?
These questions have intuitive answers, but this is FanGraphs; we like to test our assumptions around here. Andie Anderson thought she knew all the obvious ways to get dumped, but in practice it wasn’t as easy as she thought. It turns out two is a good number of GIDP. Only Masyn Winn, with one, has fewer than Henderson this season, who is tied for second place with Daulton Varsho, Riley Greene, and Jackson Merrill. Going back to 1949 (the earliest season with GIDP data), and omitting 2020, there have been nine players with GIDP-free seasons, most recently TJ Friedl in 2023.
What makes a player adept at avoiding the dreaded GIDP has an obvious answer: speed. The top 20 spots on this season’s leaderboard are mostly occupied by young guys with upper percentile sprint speed. While the bottom of the board is cluttered with old dudes and slow-moving catchers. It’s a pretty straightforward cause-and-effect relationship. Even converting GIDP to a per-opportunity rate stat (GIDP/PA with a runner on first with less than two outs) confirms that hauling booty to first base is the best way to not get doubled up.
So maybe it’s as simple as that. Run slow and log two outs in the scorebook or run fast and make fewer outs. Commit classic relationship mistakes and wind up single, or use your charismatic marketing skills and fall in love. Things might have been that simple for Andie and Ben had they not met such fierce opposition in one another. Otherwise, her interrupting poker nights and forcing plant-parenthood of a “love fern” would have spawned the breakup Andie sought, while his home-cooked candlelight dinners and the magnetism of his motorcycle would have birthed the love connection Ben lusted after. But both in movies and baseball, opposing forces are always at work and a hitter’s aptitude or aversion for double plays isn’t only measured in sprint speed.
Eventually both Andie and Ben found themselves deviating from the standard playbooks for their individual endeavors, and if you look closely at the top and bottom of the leaderboard, you’ll notice there are a few deviants there as well.
Cal Raleigh has the land speed of a walrus, and yet in his 139 opportunities to ground into a double play this year, he’s cashed in on only seven of them. Perhaps one of the underrated features of the three-true-outcomes hitter is that it’s hard to rack up GIDP if you never put the ball in play. And in Raleigh’s case when he does put the ball in play, it’s in the air almost 70% of the time. Just outside the top 20, Adley Rutschman and Eugenio Suárez fit a similar mold. Both give a less extreme proportion of their plate appearances to walks and strikeouts, but the sum of their line drive and fly ball rates still tops 65%. This trio wants to avoid double plays and they’re willing to sit through a Celine Dion concert to do it. The best example of a slow runner who avoided double plays is probably Matt Carpenter during his salsa-making 2018 campaign. His sprint speed that year was 26.5 feet/second, 73.6% of his balls in play were hit in the air, and he grounded into zero (!) double plays.
Compared to avoiding double plays, there’s more variety in the ways players find to accrue GIDP even when they’re not particularly slow. George Springer’s sprint speed is better than 72% of his peers and yet, he ranks fifth in GIDP rate. The expected batting average on the groundballs of his 16 GIDP is .358, which implies some bad luck, though it may be less misfortune and more Springer’s aptitude for misleading an expected batting average model. Expected batting average factors in launch angle, exit velocity, and for groundballs, the hitter’s sprint speed. Springer averaged an exit velocity of 96 mph on his double play balls, but when it comes to grounders, the relationship between exit velocity and batting average is not as linear as a model might assume. A little extra oomph shortens the reaction time for defenders, but it also shortens the running time for the batter. And though Springer’s sprint speed is 28.1 feet per second, his home-to-first time is 4.45 seconds. Other players with Springer’s sprint speed typically need only 4.34 seconds to get to first. Between how hard he hits the ball, his unexpectedly slow pace up the first base line, and perhaps a little bad luck, Springer winds up on the backend of a double play in 17% of his GIDP opportunities, making him the person in a relationship who asks for a soda in the final seconds of a playoff basketball game and lets a hairless dog pee on the pool table.
Luis Arraez is a below-average runner by sprint speed, but he’s basically Sonic the Hedgehog compared to the players he beat out to top the GIDP rate leaderboard. He’s slow, but he’s not lumbering-catcher slow. So how’d he earn the top spot? In this case, his greatest super power is also his greatest weakness. Think of him as the inverse of Raleigh. If Raleigh avoids GIDP by simply not putting the ball in play, Arraez is a magnet for them because he can’t stop putting the ball in play. While Raleigh is walking or striking out 40% of the time, Arraez does so only 8% of the time. He posts a fairly average groundball rate, but when that rate is applied to a larger quantity of balls in play, you get a higher likelihood for GIDP. (Fade in on a scene set in a movie theater where Arraez is provoking a fight at a screening of Sleepless in Seattle and getting his date punched out.)
Like Arraez, Jose Altuve is also more likely than most to put the ball in play rather than strike out or walk, but not to the same degree. His 15% GIDP rate stems from putting the ball in play in a rote and predictable fashion. Looking at Altuve’s batted ball location chart (see below), he’s one of the more obvious candidates for a defensive shift among right-handed hitters. Sure, teams can’t put on a full shift anymore, but Altuve still faces some manner of strategic positioning on 38% of his GIDP opportunities, which ranks 12th among qualified right-handed hitters. Of the righty hitters who see a shift in such situations more often than Altuve, only Salvador Perez (shifted against in 45% of his GIDP opportunities) has a higher GIDP rate (15.3%), suggesting Altuve is impacted by defensive shading more than his similarly shifted-against peers. Putting more balls in play and generating batted balls that are easier to defend makes Altuve the date who makes a photoshopped scrapbook of your make-believe future together, using pictures acquired from your mother without your knowledge.
But the real Andie Anderson Award winner for grounding into double plays at an impressive rate while using every possible tactic available is Jake Cronenworth. The batted balls initiating his GIDP were hit at an average exit velocity of 95 mph, they generated an expected batting average of .288, and they were hit into a shift roughly a quarter of the time. He puts the ball in play slightly more often than his peers and owns an above-average groundball rate. He makes too much contact, hitting the ball too hard and into shaded defenders. Cronenworth stepping into the box with the double play in order is Kate Hudson standing on the street, looking up at Matthew McConaughey on his balcony, having just left his apartment after Ben and Andie’s first encounter, and whispering to herself as she blows him a kiss, “I’m gonna make you wish you were dead.”
Relationships are complicated. Whether it’s a romantic relationship between two people or the relationship between a player’s abilities and their outcomes on the field. Straightforward how-to guides are limited in their applications, even with something as seemingly obvious as grounding into a bunch of double plays.
