Fun With Pitches
Posted: March 3rd, 2010 | Filed under: Baseball | 54 Comments »
The following is just a whole lot of musing about pitches and hitting and stuff. There’s no order, no rhyme, no reason and no guaranteeing that ANY OF IT makes sense. We’re just talking a little ball. Read at your own discretion.
So, my SI colleague — the brilliant Tom Verducci — had a great little chart in his story today about Ryan Howard. The chart, from Stats Inc., list off the players who faced the most breaking balls in 2009. The chart showed that Ryan Howard faced about 200 more breaking balls than the guy in second place (Dan Uggla).
I absolutely love stuff like this. There are so many games within games in baseball.
With the other-worldly Fangraphs, we can now take a little look into those games-within-games. Fangraphs uses Baseball Info Solutions pitch information to tell us what kind of pitches the players were facing. For instance, here are the five qualifying players who faced the most fastballs in 2010:
1. Luis Castillo, 73.9%
2. David Eckstein, 73.8%
3. Jason Kendall, 70.7%
4. Chone Figgins, 68.6%
5. Denard Span, 68%
See, that’s really interesting. A few thoughts about the players:
1. Castillo. His utter lack of power — .354 career slugging percentage — means pitchers are unafraid to challenge him with fastballs. Castillo can’t really run much anymore, so the thing you DO NOT want to do is walk the guy. Throw him fastballs, let him put the ball in play, take your chances. Doing that, Castillo did hit .302, and it is interesting that he was able to foul off enough pitches to draw 69 walks — Castillo has a high rate of contact and he tends to have longish at-bats.
2. Eckstein. He is so impotent as a hitter — .340 slugging percentage the last two seasons — and is so eager to put the ball in play that pitchers simply feed him fastballs and are happy to let it all play out.
3. Kendall. Another no power hitter who makes contact. Pitchers have long fearlessly (as in “without fear” not “bravely”) challenged Kendall with the fastball. It is striking how much Kendall’s on-base percentage went down the last three seasons — it’s clear now that in addition to offering no power threat, Kendall is having trouble catching up with the fastball too. Expect that fastball percentage to rise in the American League.
4. Figgins. Interesting thing … pitchers have long challenged Figgins with fastballs, again you would think because of his general lack of power and because like Kit Keller he has long had trouble laying off the high ones. But in 2009, Figgins DID lay off the high ones quite a bit more. His walk percentage jumped, his contact rate continued to go up, his percentage of long at-bats went way up, and Figgins had quite a good year. You wonder if in Seattle pitchers will continue to bust Figgins (he still strikes out a lot) or if they will mix in some other pitches.
5. Span. One of my favorite young players, I don’t think pitchers will continue to throw Span as many fastballs … this is that “adjustment” thing everyone talks about. Span last year showed a good ability to foul off pitches in the strike zone, work for walks and he led the league in triples. I would bet he could start seeing a healthy diet of breaking pitches and off-speed stuff. But we’ll see.
Wasn’t that fun? OK, so you stopped reading back at the Eckstein comment. Fine. I never promised this blog would be all Snuggies. Here are the five players facing the FEWEST fastballs.
1. Ryan Howard, 44.9%
2. Alfonso Soriano, 46%
3. Garret Anderson, 50.1%
4. Ryan Ludwick, 50.4%
5. Hunter Pence, 50.7%
I probably don’t need to go through all of these individually since, basically, there’s a clear pattern here. Nobody wants to throw Ryan Howard a fastball — he crushes those. The league challenged him with fastballs when he came up in 2005, and he banged 22 homers in 312 at-bats. The next year, he still got more than 50% fastballs as the league tried to adjust — 53% to be exact — and he massacred them, crushed 58 home runs, had the highest contact numbers of his career, had the best season of his career. These days, a pitcher would have to be either crazy or behind in the count to feed Howard a fastball.
The other guys are pretty much Pedro Cerrano types — “Bats. They are sick. … No hit curveball. Straight ball, hit it very much.” I want to show you something kind of interesting about Soriano. Take a look at the percentage of fastballs he has faced vs. his OPS+.
2002: 54.4% fastballs — 129 OPS+
2003: 57% fastballs — 126 OPS+
2004: 52.4% fastballs — 100 OPS+
2005: 47.9% fastballs — 109 OPS+
2006: 54.1% fastballs — 135 OPS+
2007: 54% fastballs — 122 OPS+
2008: 53.2% fastballs — 119 OPS+
2009: 46% fastballs — 84 OPS+
It’s not a perfect rhythm — and there are so many other things involved such as healthy and league and so on — but generally speaking when you throw Pedro Soriano fastballs, he peppers you. He can’t hit a curveball. He REALLY can’t hit a slider. And his plate discipline is as dreadful as ever so you can throw him those curveballs and sliders on three-ball counts. He might not see a fastball until July.
So, now, we will go to Fangraphs and see look at who faced the most and least of certain kind of pitches.
* * *
Most sliders
1. Ryan Ludwick, 24.8%
2. Alfonso Soriano, 24.7%
3. Ryan Howard, 24.4%
4. Justin Upton, 24.4%
5. Hunter Pence, 24.2%
Fewest sliders
1. Luis Castillo, 6.5%
2. Melky Cabrera, 7.9%
3. Kendry Morales, 8.2%
4. Chone Figgins, 8.3%
5. Randy Winn, 8.6%
Comment: More or less what you would expect based on the fastballs percentages. One surprise is Morales — the lack of sliders suggests maybe the league was still feeling him out. I don’t know. It was really Morales’ first full season and he proved to be the sort of hitter who could hit the fastball and who pounced on hanging curveballs and change-ups. I would wager that his slider percentage will go up pretty significantly in 2010 as pitchers work on their best plan to beat him. Adjustments!
* * *
Most curveballs
1. Ryan Howard, 14.2%
2. Aaron Rowand, 13.2%
3. Jack Cust, 13.0%
4. Alfonso Soriano, 12.2%
5. Aubrey Huff, 11.9%
Fewest curveballs
1. Luis Castillo, 4.8%
2. David Eckstein, 5.6%
3. Derek Jeter, 5.6%
4. Carlos Lee, 5.6%
5. Jason Kendall, 5.7%
Comment: Before we get to Jeter — who I know you noticed right away — I should point out that all of this pitch selection stuff involves more than strategy. Execution is really key. What I mean is … I was once talking with a manager and a hitting coach, and we talked about a player who could not hit good curveballs. And the hitting coach, in a disgusted way, said this: “NOBODY can hit good curveballs. That’s the thing people miss.” And it’s a great point. It’s HARD to throw curveballs that buckle the knees or sliders that start in the strike zone and at the last instant tilt out or change-ups that seem for all the world to be coming at 90 mph but are in fact only fluttering in at 80, fastballs with movement that slice the black on the outside corner. If you throw those sorts of pitches, you are going to get EVERYBODY out, Ruth to Bonds, Pujols to Mays, Aaron to Zobrist.
So pitchers with great curveballs will throw curveballs to any batter. Same with great fastball pitchers and pitchers with great sliders and all that. Strategy gets toned down.
But nobody can throw those pitches just right every time and nobody ever could. “It makes me laugh,” relief pitcher and pitching philosopher Mike Marshall told me, “whenever someone gets a hit you will always hear the announcer say — ALWAYS — ‘Oh, he left that pitch up.’ Or ‘he just missed his spot on that.’ That’s not it. You can’t throw it in a tea cup every time.” Marshall thinks the art of pitching is how you set up a hitter, the selection of pitches you use, the order you use them, because (and I love this phrase) you can’t throw it in a tea cup every time.
And THAT is where where strategy comes in. So, when you see a guy who gets a lot of curveballs — say Aaron Rowand — that is not because he can’t hit a good curveball. It’s because pitchers believe he can’t hit a mediocre curveball. It’s a great game. The pitcher knows Rowand isn’t very good on breaking stuff. Rowand knows the pitcher knows this and comes to the plate expecting to see breaking stuff. The pitcher knows that Rowand knows that the pitcher knows, so he is on alert that if he throws a hanging curveball, Rowand might just crush it. But Rowand knows this, so he might be overanxious if he sees the hanging curveball and hit it nine miles foul. Or he might be thinking curveball so much that he promises himself to not wing, and the pitcher might cross him up and throw fastball — even Aaron Rowand got more than 50% fastballs last year — and Rowand is so screwed up in his head that he just watches it go by for strike three and … yeah, it’s a great game.
Pitchers have thrown Derek Jeter the same for years — two-thirds fastballs, a healthy dose of sliders, and a few change-ups and curveballs to keep him honest. Jeter generally pounds curveballs and change-ups. He will swing and miss some — more than you might expect from a lifetime .317 hitter* — but his ability to pick up the different speeds and spins of pitches is uncanny. “You can beat him side to side,” a scout friend tells me. “But you can’t beat Jeter back and forth.” In other words, Jeter will swing at stuff outside of the strike zone, but if you try to fool him inside the zone with different speeds, he generally will crush you.
*Among the players with more than 7,500 plate appearances and a .300 batting average, Jeter ranks fourth on the strikeout rate list behind Manny Ramirez, Alex Rodriguez and Larry Walker.
* * *
Most change-ups
1. Ben Zobrist, 17.6%
2. Mark Teixeira, 16.3%
3. Melky Cabrera, 15.6%
4. Shane Victorino, 15.4%
5. Cristian Guzman, 15.3%
(tie) Nick Swisher, 15.3%
(tie) Victor Martinez, 15.3%
Fewest change-ups
1. David Eckstein, 4.7%
2. Jason Kendall, 4.8%
3. Ryan Theriot, 5.4%
4. David Wright, 6.4%
5. Jacoby Ellsbury, 6.7%
Comment: There was a little bit of desperation in the American League in 2009, I think, as pitchers were trying to figure out HOW THE HECK to get Ben Zobrist out. I mean, in mid-June the guy was hitting .318/.429/.694. He was slugging almost .700, for crying out loud. Clearly, they were not getting Zobrist out by throwing what had been a fairly typical pattern — two-third fastballs, mix of other pitches. The advance scouts noticed that Zobrist was a big-time fastball first hitter. And so pitchers went crazy on the change-ups. Zobrist did settle down in the second half of the season … but he was still pretty darned good. It should be fun to watch how pitchers attack him in 2010.
You will notice three Yankees in the Top 5 list on most change-ups. The Yankees reputation is as a fastball hitting team that will make pitchers work and lay-off on stuff that breaks out of the strike zone. That means a healthy dose of change-ups. I can’t say it was an especially effective strategy but you have to do something.
The fewest change-up guys are easy to understand — if you throw a change-up to Jason Kendall, and he cracks a single on you, yeah, you and your catcher will have some Ricky Ricardo ‘splainin to do back at the dugout.
* * *
And here are a few 2009 hitter charts (numbers rounded up and down):
Albert Pujols: 53% fastballs, 20% sliders, 10% curveballs, 10% change-ups, 7% other stuff.
– There’s no right way to pitch Pujols, just any number of wrong ways. He hits everything; a pitcher’s best bet is to keep Pujols off-balance and never give him a fastball that catches too much of the plate.
Joe Mauer: 63% fastballs, 11% sliders, 10% change-ups, 8% curveballs, 8% other stuff.
– More of a typical pitching pattern than Pujols. Mauer as a lefty mashes right-handed sliders which is why he doesn’t that many of them. Mauer has always hit well the other way and with his new-found pull power, he’s a nightmare.
Chase Utley: 61% fastballs, 17% sliders, 10% change-ups, 8% curveballs, 4% other stuff.
– Utley’s remarkably quick bat helps him adjust to just about any pitch. Last year, pitchers really tried to make Utley chase; they only threw about 46% of pitches in the zone. Utley walked more than he ever had before, but he did admit that he chased a bit more than he should have.
Billy Butler: 57% fastballs, 17% sliders, 12% change-ups, 8% curveballs, 6% other stuff.
– Butler’s only turning 24 this year, but the league pitchers have known for a while that he crunches fastballs. He really improved against the slower stuff in 2009 … fun to watch him grow as a hitter.
Pablo Sandoval: 60% fastballs, 12% change-ups, 12% curveballs, 9% sliders, 7% other stuff.
– Kung Fu Panda loves the fast stuff. Fastballs. Hard sliders. Faster the better. Look for that fastball percentage to go down as pitcher try to feed him soft foods.
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All the changeup guys are switch hitters. That’s the unifying trait amongst them.
And 4 of the 5 top slider guys are right handed hitters…And the least are all switch hitters.
The curveball guys are all hitters with huge uppercuts in their swings. The players with the least amount of curveballs faced are mainly contact guys as well.
Circle me Racine.
Against some of the names that appear multiple times on the list… Is there any way to see how someone like Wakefield attacked them? How high of a percentage of his pitches to fastball guys were knuckles vs. his mild fastball? To “breaking stuff” guys? Just curious cause this post was ABSOLUTELY fascinating.
PS- My eyes totally jumped to Jeter’s name on that list and then you called me out on it a sentence later. I had to stop and look around the room to make sure you weren’t here. Thanks!
Nice to see you on fangraphs, it’s always fun to see what great writers do with great information. You can check their performance against the pitches on the pitch value page.
extra extra bonus points for the Kit Keller not laying off the high ones reference.
“Utley walked more than he ever had before, but he did admit that he chased a bit more than he should have.”
He can’t help it. He was kind of born to chase.
Marshall must listen to Blyleven a lot – that’s exactly what he says every time. Brutal. Terrible.
love that bit about Jeter – you always hear about how great he is at keeping his hands back, now I better understand what they mean. He can sit on a fastball (all hitters sit fastball by default) but if he gets something offspeed he can hold back. Great stuff.
On the most changeups faced list all being switch hitters: these guys have the platoon advantage in every at bat. A change up is the best pitch to attack opposite handed hitters since it fades away from them. The fewest sliders faced list is all switch hitters for the same reason: a slider is generally much better against same sided hitters.
“He will swing and miss some — more than you might expect from a lifetime .317 hitter* — but his ability to pick up the different speeds and spins of pitches is uncanny.”
I don’t understand why I shouldn’t expect a lifetime .317 hitter to strike out. You do realize a strikeout only counts as one out? If you strike out 60% of the time but get a hit the other 40%, you’re still a .400 hitter.
I just don’t get why people think batters striking out is such a big deal. Would it make you feel better if he grounded out instead, or flew out? I understand sometimes outs put in play can be productive by moving runners, but generally speaking, an out is an out is an out. What I care about is a player’s on-base and slugging percentage; how he got those numbers isn’t of great concern to me. If you have to strike out 150 times a season to punch up an OPS+ of 125, so be it.
also, isn’t the interesting thing about the most changeup list is that 5 out of the 7 are switch-hitters!
okay, it looks like just about everyone beat me to that
“But it’s so simple. All I have to do is divine from what I know of you: are you the sort of man who would put the poison into his own goblet or his enemy’s? Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I am not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But you must have known I was not a great fool, you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.” -Vizzini
Circle me Rip Sewell
@10
My hunch is that Joe’s figuring that a lot of people still just naturally expect guys with career averages as high as Jeter’s (or maybe just people with Jeter’s image and reputation for contact) to strike out less often than is true. (I for one was a little surprised by that factoid) From reading Joe in the past, I’m pretty sure he wasn’t saying it to demean Jeter or to be one of those “omg, srikeouts r teh worst!!!11!” guys.
Nice post. I’m not sure you can say that Joe Mauer has “new-found pull power” though.
ISO to right field (Mauer’s pull field):
2007: 0.144
2008: 0.103
2009: 0.164
ISO to left field (Mauer’s opposite field):
2007: 0.233
2008: 0.171
2009: 0.396
Mauer had a slight power increase to his pull side, but not really anything to get too excited about. His main increase last year was going other way with power–not by pulling the ball. A look at his HRs via HitTracker backs this up; about half of his HRs to went to left, with the other half essentially evenly distributed from left-center to right field.
http://hittrackeronline.com/detail.php?id=2009_4501&type=hitter
What’s interesting is that most of those HRs are relatively short (to the extent that hitting a 360 foot line drive is “short”, anyway). None of those HRs to left are longer than 400 feet. That’s pretty much expected, given how hard it is for anyone to hit monster opposite-field home runs. It will be interesting to see if Target Field enhances or harms his tendency to drive the ball the other way.
@ Chris.
I don’t want to speak for Joe, God knows he speaks (writes) better that I’ve ever could. But I don’t think he thinks that striking out a lot doesn’t means you can’t be a valuable hitter (in facts most of the best hitters, Pujols being the exception, strike out a lot) But, for having a high batting average striking out is not really good. Yes a SO is the same as another out. But a SO doesn’t allows the ball to “fall” for a lucky hit. So a having a lot of SO doesn’t means you are a bad hitter. But it will prevent you from having a hig BA even with a good Babip. (See Jack Cust, Ryan Howard, Mark Reynolds, etc.) They are good to great hitters, they put the balls in play really hard but they don’t put it in play often enough to be consistently really high average hitters.
One thing about Slappy (aka Luis Castillo) is that his bat control does enable him to take a slow breaking pitch and dunk it the other way over the 3B/1B’s head. Fastballs, not so much.
“also, isn’t the interesting thing about the most changeup list is that 5 out of the 7 are switch-hitters!”
Even more interesting, the other 2 guys are also switch hitters!
I’m pretty sure Kendry saw so few sliders because he’s a switch hitter, and sliders have a big platoon split.
‘But nobody can throw those pitches just right every time and nobody ever could.’ True, but like Jeter(ok example) if you can create SEPARATION(weight moving forward while maintaining ‘bat lag’) one can go to the opposite field. The 1st axiom of baseball…good pitching(weight moving fwd/with arm lag) beats good hitting(oops did I mistep..I’ll need SABR blessing on that one!)
Which brings us to: 1)have Chase or Ichiro EVER hit an opposite field blast? 2) Why did C.C. throw the same tea cup (down/in)pitch to Chase? 3) Would be interesting to know who has the highest % of opposite field homers…now that’s great lag WITH great bat *energy….I’m bettin’ a parlay on this one, I’ll take a) Elfago Baca to b) SABR knows the answer and doesn’t care to disclose it. (*energy* is defined as batted ball does NOT have to carry wall simply get there as a ‘white blur.’ According to very reliable sources starting in 2020 batted balls will be timed/clocked from bat impact to wall impact and those that fall under suggested time parameters will be deemed a home run, but the batter is still going to have to run vs. trot the bases.
“I just don’t get why people think batters striking out is such a big deal. Would it make you feel better if he grounded out instead, or flew out?”
All outs are not created equally. That’s why SAC’s and FC are treated differently in scoring than 6-3 or backwards K’s.
Striking out is worse than other outs because nothing productive can come out of a strikeout; unless C lets the ball pass and B advances to 1st base.
However, a weak grounder in the hole at 2nd can score a runner from 3rd with < 2 outs. Warning track power can also score a runner from 3rd with < 2 outs.
Someone can have decent OPS but still make outs (baserunning blunders, caught stealing, etc.) Those are rally killers and take away the ability to score runs.
High OPS does not rule out unproductive outs. And high unproductive outs are very bad. High strike out % is not good under any circumstances whereas productive outs are generally accepted as good.
Also, the idea of putting the ball in play is better than striking out. A ball in play can potentially lead to a baserunner. A ball in play can signal to a P or a B that the B has the potential to make good (or bad) conact the next AB. A strike out usually does not. There is also the psychological factor of seeing teammates unable to make contact. That makes the P seem more dominant, which can affect a B's AB.
In sum, productive outs = not good but tolerable; outs = bad; strike outs = worse.
One of the best things to me about baseball is the game of psychological warfare that takes place within the game on almost every single at bat. Just like Whitey Herzog said,
A slick way to outfigure a person is to get him figuring you figure he’s figuring you’re figuring he’ll figure you aren’t really figuring what you want him to figure you figure.
I recently broke up with my girlfriend. February was really my first full month and I proved to be the sort of player who could pick up women wearing a flece with a draped scarf and who pounced on 23 year-olds, and their slightly less attractive friends. Alas, my strikeout percentage was at a record high. I would wager that my use of chinos and a tasteful leather jackets will go up (and conversely, my hipster-wear percentage, down) pretty significantly in 2010 as women work on their best plan to thwart my advances.
ADJUSTMENTS!!
Chris,
Ted Williams for his career hit about .328 on balls in play. So, if Ted Williams had struck out in 60% of his at bats and his BABIP stayed the same, he would have hit about .177 for his career (assuming all 521 of his homeruns were over the fence).
A batter cannot strike out 60% of the time and hit .400, because even the best hitters of all time do not .500 on balls in play, let alone 1.000. Ichiro hits about .357 on balls in play for his career. Tony Gwynn hit .341. Wade Boggs hit .344. In the modern era Ty Cobb leads in career BABIP with .378. In a player’s best season they hit in the low .400′s for BABIP.
Jaaay,
No.
Jay Sparks
I’m laughing at the concept of Tim Wakefield ‘attacking’ anything, (maybe a post-game steak?)
With no fta Baseball coverage in the UK last season, I had no chance to check, a thought that occurred to me in an idle moment,
is Wakefield’s pick-off throw quicker than his ‘fastball’?
How is Jason Kendall still picking up a (game playing) salary?
If Billy Beane could not find the then perceived value surely every other GM should avoid the husk that was the on-base machine JK?
This is awesome stuff.
I picked up Greinke, Butler, & DDJ, in my fantasy draft yesterday.
I’ve seen it written that NOBODY could throw a fastball past Howard Johnson. He played on the same team as Aurelio Rodriguez for a couple years. I’ve always wondered how he would have fared against Senor Smoke when he was “on”. Lopez could sometimes throw a high fastball on the outside corner that I’m pretty sure NOBODY could hit. It wasn’t so much the speed as the movement. He got a lot of called strikes as I recall.
#6 Brad
Here’s your rimshot!
Thanks. Will you be here all week?
The problem with a high strikeout total has nothing to do with productive outs; that’s essentially nonsense.
Of course, a strikeout is not like other outs anyway, for entirely different reasons.
A percentage of all balls put into play will result in the runner reaching base safely. Period. A hitter who strikes out 100 times more than the league average has cost himself (generally speaking, there are exceptions for real banjo hitters) around 18 hits give or take, regardless of how well he hit in his other at-bats which were not strikeouts.
The reason most sabermetrically inclined types don’t worry much about strikeouts is because the value of 18 hits isn’t necessarily that much; by studying variations in BABIP which are far above the norm, it’s clear that most of the extra hits a batter accumulates when he has a higher than expected BABIP are singles which found holes, so it follows that most of the “missing” hits for a batter who has a low BABIP also “would have been” singles.
So the real truth about high strikeout totals is that they are in fact relevant and are a “bad” thing, but they’re not such a bad thing that we should worry about them overmuch. If a guy like Adam Dunn is striking out 160 times a year, it doesn’t matter; his value is NOT in hitting singles anyway, and furthermore he walks enough to counteract the lost hits. When you’ve got a guy with no power and no plate discipline and a .270 batting average who strikes out 100 times… that’s when it’s a problem, because if he just made contact instead of striking out he might actually approach being remotely useful.
Joe, the pitch data is certainly interesting, but there’s some bias built in. Team schedules are unbalanced and dominated by divisional play. For example, each AL East team played its other division foes 72 times — that’s over 44% of each of their respective slates against just four teams. In Derek Jeter’s case, 45.1% of his 716 PA came vs BOS, TB, TOR and BAL. So the pitch distribution is going to be skewed by the specific repertoires those opposing pitchers feature in their arsenals. Needless to say this distribution isn’t even close to uniform on a division-by-division basis. What’s interesting in Jeter’s case is that those AL East foes ranked 5th (BOS, 12.1%), 9th (BAL, 11.3%), 11th (TB, 11.0%) and 16th (TOR, 9.4%) among teams most frequently throwing curves (for the record, his Yankee teammates ranked 6th at 11.9%). There were 14 teams throwing curves less frequently than the Jays. The lesson? Stick Jeter in another MLB division, and he likely faces curves even LESS frequently than he did, and probably moves atop that list.
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But Brown Dog, those AL East pitchers may be throwing more curve balls because the routinely face all those great fastball hitters on the Yankees, Red Sox and Rays, so the lesson may be that those same pitchers would throw fewer curves overall, but the same % to Jeter, if they pitched in a different division.
Check out this new Twitter account that just launched. Lance Berkman is cracking me up!
http://twitter.com/PumaWonLiners
I think it’s awesome that the banner ad on your SI archive is for Strat-O-Matic. Perfect fit!
Jeter’s BA/OBP the last 5 seasons was .322/.393. Maybe they should start throwing him more curves.
As a follow-up to Jon Morse #30:
If you find a hitter with a high batting average who strikes out a lot, you’d expect him to have a high BABIP–perhaps remarkably so, if he sustained the performance over many seasons. He’d have to have a high BABIP to make up for the hits he lost by striking out.
In Jeter’s case, that’s exactly what you see. His career K rate is about 17%–not totally outrageous or anything, but on the high side for the type of hitter he is. However, his career BABIP is .360, which is fantastic. As in Hornsby-Carew-Ichiro fantastic.
Essentially, Jeter doesn’t make as much contact as you might expect given his batting average, but he maintains that high average because when he does hit the ball, he’s capable of making “good” contact and is fast enough to beat out a decent number of infield hits.
And just to bring home the point about change-ups and switch hitters, since no one quite connected the dots, is that switch hitters always have the platoon advantage and the best pitch to use against the platoon advantage is the circle change (which I think is still the “vogue” way to throw the change up) because it moves away from the batter.
Tom Glavine almost never threw change ups to LH hitters. It was his pitch to use to RH hitters. Mark Buehrle rarely throws his change up to LH hitters either.
So a switch hitter, who always has the platoon advantage would always see a lot of change ups.
Frankly, a switch hitter batting against Tom Glavine should think about batting LH against him, because his breaking pitches (which work best when the pitcher has the platoon advantage) were not anything special.
Love the League of Thier Own reference
@39 Brent,
1. Somebody else already *did* connect those dots & posted about it.
2. Glavine just retired. . . .
@ Jaaay:
“In sum, productive outs = not good but tolerable; outs = bad; strike outs = worse.”
I think you meant productive outs=bad, but slightly less so; outs= bad; strike outs=outs.
You just destroyed Verducci’s article. I guess maybe he had a word limit!
Great stuff.
On this whole strikeout business, while statistically they are probably just as bad as another out, especially in the long term, they are still more annoying than other outs and produce no positive output in comparison with other outs that can produce some value.
I do think there is a hierarchy of outs, mostly because outs like sacrifice flies are better as they produce some value in increasing run output, getting a runner to third increases the chances of a run scoring, or scoring a run increases run output.
The sacrifice bunt is still a terrible idea and yes a batter should not be going up there, in almost every situation, looking for a long fly ball to get that runner home from third with less than two outs. But I’d rather see those things than a strike out.
Also the three true outcome type players like Adam Dunn, Ryan Howard, Mark Reynolds, etc. are still valuable but would be significantly more valuable with higher better averages and less strikeouts.
@ 44 Jon H.
While I don’t disagree entirely with your premise about a hierarchy of outs, I , like dtro, fail to see the difference between “non-productive outs” and strikeouts. An out is an out, and hitters like Dunn, etc. are valuable regardless of their strikeouts because of their tremendous power, and in Dunn’s case, plate discipline.
Please somebody correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think I’ve seen anybody mention double plays when they’re talking about groundouts perhaps moving a runner up or even scoring him from third. Those results are definitely possible; so are double plays, which of course both add another out (total of two) *and* erase a previously existing baserunner.
Strikeouts (well, unless a runner is caught stealing on the same pitch) don’t lead to double plays.
@Bellwether,
+1. Well played sir.
@34: Jason Lisk — That’s an excellent point, Jason.
[...] YOU READING JOE POSNANSKI? He has another interesting article which is essentially about Alfonso Soriano swinging at sliders in the dirt. (HT: John) You’ll love it, [...]
Joe, you say “The fewest change-up guys are easy to understand — if you throw a change-up to Jason Kendall, and he cracks a single on you, yeah, you and your catcher will have some Ricky Ricardo ‘splainin to do back at the dugout.”
I don’t think David Wright being on there is quite so easy to explain – unless the league caught on to his reduced power really fast and lost all fear that he might get it back during the season. I’d be interested to see what his changeup percentages were from ’06-’08 and if it will remain so low if he starts hitting for power again this year.
Off-topic; the Snuggie game in Cleveland is on now.
It’s pretty funny, you have to admit. Looks like they’re playing in an immense monastery.
Have you noticed how absurdist humor has really caught on? I mean, when I was a kid you could never get 20,000 people to participate in a super-ironic, somehwat self-mocking joke. It’s kind of amazing.
Joe, I thought I’d go off-topic to show you this Dayton Moore quote from another website…
Moore outlined his plan for getting the Royals back to the top. He conceded that it’s not an overnight process. Even though Moore, 43, was hired in June 2006, it took more than a year to go through one draft and hire his people.
“The timeline for us really started in 2007, 2008, to figure out how we want to do this,” said Moore, who last season had his contract extended through 2014. “A lot of people try to pin you down on the time frame. How long is it going to take? The answer is I have no idea.”
–I honestly don’t know what rubs me the wrong way about that quote…I think it’s the casual way he says 2007, 2008 as if those are consecutive days of the week. As far as I can tell that’s 730 days of a whole front office coming to work(in suits and ties of course) for 8 hours a day…to figure out how to begin to rebuild?
I’m so glad the White Sox are my team…yeah, the braintrust is bat s*** crazy sometimes, but at least they’re trying.
@ electric/45
I said Dunn was valuable. Given a choice between Dunn and either of the Cubs two corner outfielders at this point (Cubs being my favorite team) I would take Dunn in a heartbeat (particularly over Soriano). I’m saying that if he made contact a few more times and struck out a few less times he’d be more valuable because some of those balls in play would become hits. This is not a particularly revolutionary observation.
If we take away 100 strikeouts from Dunn last year (giving him 77 for the season) and put the average of 18 hits that Jon Morse outlined in post 30 then Dunn’s average for last year is .300, as compared to the .267 which he did have (which was a career high by the way). I didn’t calculate OBP but I’m sure it’s much better as well.
In other words those 100 non-strikeouts turn Adam Dunn from a highly flawed player into a slightly less good Albert Pujols, at least offensively. That’s a significant difference.
@Chuck 2/46
I haven’t thought about double play balls that lead to runs. I would say a strike out is more valuable than a double play with a runner on third, especially with 1 out. That being said if a guy is not a double play machine or if there is not some mitigating circumstance like runners on first/third contact would still be more valuable because of the increased chance of the runner to move up/increased chance of the hitter making it on base.
This of course only means if the alternative to not making contact, where we don’t know the outcome, is a strikeout. If the alternative to not making contact is a walk, I’ll take the walk over contact.
This is off-topic, but will you be posting you Oscar picks this year, Joe?