Considering Jack Cust
Posted: May 13th, 2009 | Filed under: Baseball | 43 Comments »
Every so often people will will ask me: How does your mind work? I will admit that the person most often asking is my wife Margo, and she generally asks that question when I put my daughter’s shirt on backward or I take the long way driving because that’s the way I know. But every so often other people will ask me the question too: How does your mind work?
So, here’s a little sense of that. Be afraid. Be very, very afraid.
I was watching the Royals play the A’s on Wednesday night, and Jack Cust came to the plate. I love Jack Cust. Who doesn’t? So, like anyone would, I spent a bit of time contemplating Jack Cust. I looked up his statistics, and here’s what struck me:
Last year, Jack Cust came up 598 times.
He struck out 197 times: That’s about 1/3 of the time. He walked 111 times. That’s about one out of every five times. Total: Jack Cust walked or struck out more than 50 percent of the time he came to the plate last year.
Best I can tell, only two players in baseball history who have qualified for the batting title have done the Jack Cust dance — that is, walk 100 times, strike out 100 times and not make contact half of the time they came to the plate. The first, of course, Jack Cust in 2008.
The second? Yeah, Jack Cust in 2007.*
*Does this make Jack Cust the most boring player in baseball history? You would think so: The guy doesn’t even HIT THE BALL more than half the time. And yet, no, I think Cust is actually a lot of fun to watch. Maybe it’s the name. Maybe it’s the Matt Stairs persona. I don’t know.
Highest percentage of walks+strikeouts in baseball history (min. 100 walks, 100 Ks):
1. Jack Cust, 2007: 53%
2. Jack Cust, 2008: 51%
3. Jack Clark, 1987: 49%
4. Mickey Tettleton, 1990: 48%
5. Jim Thome, 1999: 47%
6. Ryan Howard, 2007: 47%
7. Jack Clark, 1989: 47%
8. Mark McGwire, 1998: 47%
9. Jim Thome, 2001: 46%
10. Adam Dunn, 2006: 45%
Now, you will note the caveat: I did not include players who walked fewer than 100 times or struck out fewer than 100 times. Barry Bonds in 2004. for instance, walked 232 times and struck out 41, so he did not make contact in more than 44% of his at-bats. Mark Reynolds struck out 204 times last year, walked 64, so he didn’t touch the ball in about 44% of his at-bats too. But I really wanted the well-rounded batter, the one who walks AND strikes out at an extremely high rate.
And as you can see, the high walk-strikeout guys are, mostly, a recent phenomenon. Jimmy Wynn in 1969 is 12th on the list; he walked or struck out 44% of the time. Before Wynn, you have to go down to 44th place — Mickey Mantle in 1967 at 40%.
You can see the leaders by decade:
2000s: Jack Cust, 53%
1990s: Jim Thome, 1999: 47%
1980s: Jack Clark, 1987: 49%
1970s: Willie Mays, 1971: 44%
1960s: Jimmy Wynn, 1969: 44%
1950s: Mickey Mantle, 1958: 38%
1940s: Eddie Joost, 1947: 33%
1930s: Dolph Camilli, 1938: 35%
The ball just got put in play a lot more in the olden days of ball. This may be one quick reason to explain why batters hit for so much higher average in years past. Take the National League in 1930 — you know, the whole league hit .303 that season. That was the year Bill Terry hit .401, the year Hack Wilson drove in 191 RBIs, the year 23 out of the 44 batters who qualified for the batting title hit .320 or better.
Well, that year the whole league only struck out about 8% of the time.
To give you an idea, last year, in the National League, batters hit .260 and struck out 18% of the time.
How much of a difference is that? Well, if batters had struck out at the 1930 strikeout rate, there would have been 10,000 more balls hit in play. Yikes. TEN THOUSAND more balls in play. We know that, generally speaking, about 30% of balls in play turn into hits but to prove the point, let’s take it down a notch and say that only 25% of those balls hit in play would have been hits.
If you make that adjustment, the league would have hit .288 last year instead of .260. Chipper Jones only struck out 11% of the time last year … but if you drop that down to 8% and make the adjustments, he would have hit .376. Matt Holliday would have put 50 more balls in play and might have hit closer to .350. And so on.*
*Interestingly enough, Albert Pujols struck out 54 times in 641 plate appearances. That, friends, is 8%. Pujols is like a guy right out of the 1930s.
And thinking about that led me to wonder … everyone talks about why no one will ever hit .400 again. And I’ve heard many, many reasons: Night games, travel, the slider, the split-fingered fastball, improved fielding, the intense media pressure, on and on and on and on.
BUT … could it just come down to the fact that batters strike out a whole lot more than they did in the .400 hitting days? I do realize that all of the above reasons would contribute to more strikeouts, but I am still wondering here: Is that what it comes down to?
There have been nine .400 seasons since 1920 (when strikeouts are counted on Baseball-Reference). As you might imagine, none of the batters struck out even 8% of the time the year they hit .400. Rogers Hornsby hit .401 in 1922 and struck out 7% of the time. That was the most. George Sisler hit .407 and .420 in 1920 and ‘22 respectively … and he struck out 19 times the first year, 14 times the second. Basically, the guy struck out 3% of the time.
Now, we look at the players who have challenged .400 since Ted Williams last did it in 1941 — all of them have that one thing in common. They all put the ball in play a lot*. George Brett only struck out 4%of the time in 1980, when he made his great run.
*Excepting Andres Galarraga … more on him in a minute.
Or take Rod Carew in in 1977 when he hit .388. We’ll play a little math game. Carew only struck out 8% of the time … that’s outstanding, but it is too high, I think, if you want to hit .400. Basically, if he had eight more hits instead of outs, he would have hit .400.
Well, to get eight more hits, I’d say he had to put the ball in play 26 more times.
Carew struck out 55 times. So if he had cut his strikeout rate in half — to 4% — then I think he would have put those 26 balls in play and hit .400.
Same is true for Ted Williams in 1957. He hit .388 that year, and much was made of the fact that if he had only legged out five more infield hits over the season, he would have hit .400 again. True, but more to the point: Williams struck out 8% of the time in 1957. Again, that’s really good, but it’s not superhuman. To hit .400, you have to be superhuman. The year the Kid hit .400, he struck out much less … 4.5% of the time.
Williams struck out 43 times in 1957. If he had cut down his strikeouts, put 15 or 16 more balls in play, he probably would have gotten those five hits and hit .400 again.
And so on. Andres Galarraga in 1993 hit .370 despite striking out 73 times. That was in crazy Mile High Stadium, when the Rockies hit .306 at home as a team (with a preposterous .333 batting average on balls in play) while visitors hit .308 in Mile High. Anyway, Galarraga was 18 hits shy of .400 that year. If he had cut his strikeouts down to 4% — that would have meant putting 53 more balls in play. And that might have gotten him his .400 batting average.
So, that got me thinking: A great hitter who could strike out 4 or 5% of the time in one year, in a favorable park, might actually hit .400.*
*This seems like a good way to pick who has a shot at .400 — or at least someone capable making a run. Pick someone who doesn’t strike out much. Pujols is a guy who, perhaps, could do it. He rarely strikes out … he might be able to pull off a 4% strikeout year. His trouble is that he’s right-handed which hurts him — since World War II, the only righty to hit better than .370 in a season was Nomah in 2000, and he didn’t hit A LOT better (.372).
Ichiro very rarely strikes out, but you have to think his best days are in the past. Jose Reyes is one of the younger guys out there who shows the potential for not striking out a lot, and he has the speed to beat out some infield hits. But his plate discipline is shaky and he just gets too many at-bats, I think, to maintain a high average (and he’s only hit .300 once anyway).
I would probably nominate Joe Mauer as the best hope for .400. He doesn’t strike out much. Because he’s a catcher, he will have the reduced number of at-bats. I don’t think he could keep up his energy enough to hit .400 over a full season as a catcher … but I do think he will win more batting titles.
And that led me to do one last nutty math thing: I looked at the 200 best batting averages since Ted Williams hit .400 in 1941 — made the strikeout adjustment (reduced their strikeouts to 4%), added the likely number of hits to the equation (considering that hitters usually get hits on 30% of the balls they put in play) and looked to see who (if any) would hit .400.
As it turns out, there have been six seasons since 1942 where, if a hitter had managed to only strike out 4% of the time, he likely would have hit .400.
1. Manny Ramirez, 2000: .416
Comment: How about that one? Manny hit .356 that year but struck out 117 times. In baseball history only four guys have hit .350 or batter while striking out 100 times in a season.
2. Andres Galarraga, 1993: .404
3. Ted Williams, 1957: .403
4. Rod Carew, 1977: .401
5. Larry Walker, 1999: .401
6. Larry Walker, 1997: .400
And believe it or not, the next guy on the list is … Larry Walker. According to this rough little formula, Walker would have hit .398 in 2001. [I originally made a mistake on this; thanks to the brilliant readers for the catch]
Other interesting years: Roberto Clemente in 1967, formula adjusted, hits .397, and so does Mickey Mantle in 1957. Mantle is not realistic — he could not have cut his swing down to strike out only 4% of the time — but Clemente in his younger days struck out much less than he did later. Clemente struck out 103 times in 1967.
The biggest jump on the list is Mo Vaughn, hit hit .334 in 1998 despite striking out 144 times. I know you were wondering … there have been 26 different seasons where a batter struck out 140 ore more times and hit .300. Vaughn’s is the best batting average season. After him is Sammy Sosa (.328 in 2001), Vaughn again (.326 in ’96), Sosa again (.320 in 2000) and Galarraga (..318 in 1997).
One more worth mentioning: Cito Gaston hit .318 despite striking out 142 times in 1970. And, yeah, then I started to wonder how that would affect Gaston’s managing. Would he be more tolerant of strikeouts being a big strikeout guy? Less tolerant? Are managers generally more or less tolerant of their own weaknesses? I found when writing The Machine that Sparky Anderson, who could not hit a lick, was LESS tolerant of players who could not hit. But he was also less tolerant of pitchers who struggled to get hitters out.
Sparky’s an interesting guy. Anyway, I think so.
And then I look back at the mental wreckage I have left behind … all because I stopped to consider Jack Cust. It’s exhausting watching a baseball game.
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Joe, you rock. Love the insane crazy stats!
Ron Gardenhire approves of players like he was: scrappy utility infielders who can’t hit.
One intersting note here is that in the NL in 1930, the batting average on balls in play was .310 (.333 if you include HRs as “in play”). If players cold expect consistently better results from putting a ball in play back then, swings might have been tailored more for contact where as now there might be more payoff in swinging harder, striking out more but hitting the ball harder when contact is made. Improved defense over the years would probably be the big driver there.
Of course, maybe BABIP has just gone down because pitchers get more break on the ball these days.
Jack Cust is my favorite player. He’s goofy-looking, strikes out constantly, walks constantly, and hits bombs. He’s gone from “oh shit the ball’s going Cust’s way!” to “Cust will probably catch that, I think” in the field, and he seems like a super nice dude. Never argues balls and strikes. Has a preposterous uppercut. I really don’t get why he wasn’t given a legit shot until age 28 – the dude’s got a 131 career OPS+. In the minors he hit 200 home runs (200 HOME RUNS!!???!) with a career .429 OBP.
He is truly the definition of a Three True Outcomes player.
cool
Joe, you have just shed some light on one of the more idiotic ideas the Royals had in the pre-Moore era: teaching their pitchers to “pitch to contact” instead of trying to strike people out.
Fortunately, the current pitching staff has been assembled by someone who understands the value of K’s and how they relate to BABIP, etc. The results, so far, speak for themselves.
not first
A mind is a terrible thing to waste.
Russell Branyan has the potential to join the elite 100/100/50% club. He’s done the 50% part a couple of times, but has never been able to 1) stay healthy, and 2) avoid getting benched for his low BA, long enough to pile up enough walks and strikeouts.
“I know you were wondering … there have been 26 different seasons where a batter struck out 140 ore more times and hit .400.”
Methinks you’ll want to change that to .300, cause if someone hit .400 and K’ed 140 times, that would be crazy.
“there have been 26 different seasons where a batter struck out 140 ore more times and hit .400″
I believe that is supposed to be .300
Um… Larry Walker’s 2001 season can’t be counted as numbers 6 and 7 on the list.
I was not particularly successful playing baseball, as Casey noted, as it is a game of skill.
But the only-est thing that got me playing on organized teams well into puberty was the manager telling me to choke up on the bat.
I’m sure but apparently there’s something about physics or leverage or something that makes choking up on the bat easier for a banjo hitter like me to swat Texas Leaguers over the 2nd Baseman’s head. And you look at Ty Cobb’s batting style and he’s got half-a-bat in play most of the time.
So it’s bothered me for thirty years or so to see no one — NO one! chokes up on the bat. Ever. Even on an 0-2 count. No. Even the Mendoza Line hitters are gripping the knob (in a nice way, I mean) and hacking away like they think they’re due to channel their inner Mantle.
Or did only pathetic players like me get told to choke up on the bat?
Joe, I often think about things like this—I’m just too lazy to do the research and find the answers. Thanks for doing it for us.
Your thought about whether or not Gaston’s personal style as a player impacted his managing is something I’ve wondered about in the past. I once went to the trouble of looking up managers who had played and then compared their own hitting prowess to how well the teams they managed hit, and there was a bit of a correlation. I can’t recall the exact outcome, but there was a tendency for guys who were above-average hitters as players to manage teams that also hit above average, and vice versa. I’ll try to find the exact numbers, but if anyone else has a real study (as opposed to my neanderthal methodology) please feel free to point me toward it.
I guess this is why Callaspo hits for average and why Jacobs does not.
This is a post from the future . . . Wednesday night!?!?!?!?!?
I was always amazed by Bobby Bonds season when he hit .302 and struck out nearly 200 times (189, maybe?).
Seems like a great year of hitting to me. A bunch of his swings, that did put the ball in play, wound up being hits.
Interesting post, I remember a while back a post about hitters in the post-Moneyball era walking at the same rate as hitters in the pre-Moneyball era. You wondered why there isn’t more walking even though all the stats show that walking helps the team. I thought that stat might be a product of pitchers trying to cut down on walks since they too know that walking helps a team.
This stat about players putting the ball in play more often is interesting in that I think the reason that players don’t put it in play as much, and striking out more, is because there seems to be an over emphasis on “working a pitcher.” In the 30’s 40’s 50’s etc. starters almost always finished the game, so there wasn’t a need to get a pitcher’s pitch count up. So hitters were more likely to hack at the first good pitch they saw, and would not get into as many 2 strike at bats.
A side-effect of working a pitcher’s pitch count is that often you will get into a 2-strike count, and then you’ll be more likely to strike out, or as you showed in another post, hit for an abysmal average.
I think you missed one. Magglio Ordonez would’ve hit .400 on the nose in 2007 if he struck out just 4% of the time (that year, he struck out 11% whilst hitting .363)
If Jack Cust is ever boring then it’s not his fault, it’s the pitcher’s fault.
If the pitcher just throws the ball in the strike zone, Cust will most likely whiff or maybe hit a home run, and neither of those is boring.
Wow – great new approach to the .400 question.
~
The original part of this post made me think of Rob Deer (Tiger fans of the early 90s are partial to the Three True Outcomes – you already touched on Mickey Tettleton). Deer doesn’t quite get to 100 walks, but he has a couple of big seasons: in ‘87 he’s at 48% with 86 walks and in ‘91 he’s at 49% with 89 walks.
Those two seasons are also interesting for this point: if you take away his HRs (not truly a ball “in play”), he put the ball in play safely in just 10% of his PAs.
…just to add: for his career, if you don’t count HRs as balls in play, then Deer only put the ball in play just over 50% of his PAs.
~
Touching on the issue with Cito Gaston, since his return to the Jays Toronto has been hitting at a markedly better rate. One of Cito’s philosophies of hitting, which Joe touched on a couple weeks ago, was being aggressive on the first pitch.
No wonder they were able to get games in in just over 2 hours back in the day. Those 10,000 balls in play are extra time we don’t spend waiting for another pitch to be thrown.
Callaspo’s career K rate (over four VERY partial seasons) is 8.3%, which puts him in the neighborhood of Mr. Pujols.
On the other hand, he has a career SLG of .370, which probably goes a long way toward explaining his career average of .279–if you cut his K rate down to 4%, he’s still just a .293 hitter.
BTW, all of those numbers are lots better in the first 30 games of this season (especially the SLG, thanks largely to hitting his first AND SECOND career HR in the last month).
This sort of post is exactly why Joe remains the best around.
I like the way your mind works.
Joe, there is a *big* flaw in your calculations. You said:
“We know that, generally speaking, about 30% of balls in play turn into hits but to prove the point, let’s take it down a notch and say that only 25% of those balls hit in play would have been hits.”
For an *average* hitter yes, but high-BA hitters are, by definition, not average. For someone to hit .400 (or even .300), their BABIP has to be MUCH higher than this. In fact, it has to be higher than .400.
In 1941, Williams hit .431 on balls in play (including home runs). In 1994, Tony Gwynn hit .413 on balls in play. In 1980, Brett hit .410 on balls in play.
Being able to hit for high average on balls in play is a skill and, I think, the more critical one for high-average hitters. The problem with strikeouts is that they require you to hit or *even higher* BABIP to get to .400. For Jack Cust to hit .400, for example, he’d have to have hit a ridiculous **.680** on balls in play.
When Woolner was over at Baseball Prospectus, he would occasionally run reports of Normalized Three True Outcomes. Haven’t seen one for a while, but….
http://www.baseball-analysis.com/article.php?articleid=4721
Barry Bonds choked up on his bat.
I want someone to reevaluate the sheer unrivaled glory of Bonds steroid years in light of these other great players, AROD, Sosa, McGwire, Manny, and many more. None of them were in league with what Barry did for 5 years straight. Not truly close in how perfect his hitting was. There’s got to be something to being the best of the PED users, particularly as their numbers rise and rise.
Moneyhawk: I think David Eckstein chokes up on the bat quite often. At least in my memory Eckstein is always choking up and swatting at the ball like a kid swinging at a pinata.
My money’s on the pinata.
Uhh, in 1957 wasn’t Williams like 42 years old?(too lazy to look it up). So he wasn’t going to be “legging” out too many infield singles anyway. Your point has heaps of merit though as we all know babip rates are around .300 so its pretty easy maths in the end.
MikeS, BABIP including HRs is not BABIP. So I’m not sure the numbers you present are all that helpful.
A high walk rate helps too, because then you’re able to cut down the actual number of AB you need to hit 502 PA. Although, high-walk players tend to also be high-K players. That’s what made Williams special – he was one of the rare examples of a player who had all three qualities needed:
- high walk rate to reduce sample size of ABs and increase variance
- low K rate to put a bunch of balls in play
- high HR rate, because BA on HRs is 1.000
And I’m guessing he also had a high line drive rate, which would have increased his BABIP.
Mauer is a good guess for someone who has a shot at it. But I’m going with Pujols. He’s got everything Williams had, though his walk rate isn’t quite as high.
Not to mention, if Pujols and Mauer are both batting .400 in June, I’d guess Pujols gets a lot more intentional walks in the second half of the season than Mauer, since Pujols has the power threat too. So that would further reduce his ABs and increase the possible variance in BA.
Jack Clark’s 1987 season is a classic. This statistic has probably been topped by McGwire/Bonds/Sosa these days, but there’s a guy on BTF who had the theory that Clark in 1987 hit the ball harder on average than just about anybody ever. He calculated on-contact isolated power and Clark’s was one of the highest ever, if not the highest.
Question: Did Bruce Bochy have a weakness for being pulled from games due to ridiculous double switches?
It must be the only way to explain his love of the double switch, especially if the pitcher is not due up in the next 3 hitters.
Also two predictions for you Joe
1) Bochy pulls a double switch when the Giants paly the Mariners in interleague (or at another AL team)
2) The Mets get their first No Hitter courtesy of johan Santana this Saturday when he absolutely dominates the Giants* hitters. On second thoughts, it has perfect game written all over it.
*I am a Giants fan which is why I know this will happen
Apropos of almost nothing, can I just say that never did I love my hometown Rangers as much as when Tettleton was in town?
Favorite. Batting stance. Ever.
Favorite. Batting stance. Ever.
Dude, clearly you never saw John Wockenfuss hit…
MonkeyHawk #13: Barry Bonds choked up, at least in his later years. (I see Sam #30 already noted this.)
J!m Future #38 and McKingford #39 — I’m guessing neither of you is old enough to have seen Dick McAuliffe bat. He faced directly at the pitcher — in other words, a straight line drawn from shoulder to shoulder would have paralleled a line from 1B to 3B, instead of the standard line straight up the middle (more or less).
There’s no way Manny was going to strike out less. His whole approach presupposes a fairly high amount of strikeouts. He has a disdain for balls he cannot hit well (forinstance the slider on the outside corner). He is such an “artiste” of hitting that he ignores situations (like 2 outs, men in scoring position) and will take a 2 strike pitch for a K looking rather than try to just punch out a hit. He NEVER EVER swings on 3-0 so he always gives up a strike there. He INTENTIONALLY misses badly sometimes so as to dupe the pitcher into throwing the same thing to him in a later at bat.
Victor Martinez.
Jack Cust is a classic example of baseball management looking at what a player CAN’T do, rather then what he CAN do.
Name of the game is scoring runs, and if a big league manager can’t figure out a way to incorporate above average OBP and above average slugging, then they need to go back to manager school.
I have been following his career since he was with El Paso in Double A ball and he has been remarkably consistent in his walks and power numbers – both high.
Cust may be many things, but inconsistent in his strengths is not one of them