A few years ago — unfortunately I don’t remember where — I remember seeing an article beginning with the premise that not all pitches out of the strike zone are alike. What we offer here on FanGraphs is O-Swing%, a rate of swings at pitches out of the PITCHf/x zone. Yet this groups all such swings and pitches together, and for a hitter, swinging at a pitch an inch outside is different from swinging at a pitch a foot outside. One might indicate a little better discipline than the other. The author decided to see if there were cases where O-Swing% was misleading, given the distribution of swings at balls. What he found was, no, it’s fine. Over full seasons, there’s no need to get more granular. But what about when you’re short of full seasons?

This little study was inspired by Jose Abreu, and a hunch. Abreu, right now, owns a 152 wRC+ in his first-ever exposure to the bigs, and his isolated slugging percentage is an impossible .369. He’s already been everything the White Sox could’ve dreamed of. Abreu also owns one of baseball’s higher O-Swing% rates, at 39%. He’s been fed a lot of pitches out of the zone, and he’s swung at a lot of pitches out of the zone, and that trait and success don’t always go hand in hand. What I wondered was: has Abreu been swinging at borderline balls, or has he really been fishing? He’s already demonstrated that he can drive pitches on any of the edges. His functional zone might just be bigger than the average zone. To what degree has his zone really expanded?

Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 444
Dave Cameron is both (a) the managing editor of FanGraphs and (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio — during which edition he maybe does or doesn’t advocate on behalf of not ever swinging.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 37 min play time.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

The Royals, as you most likely know, are something far from a powerful team. It took them until April 9 to hit their first homer of the year, an Alex Gordon shot that likely wouldn’t have made it out of any ballpark in the big leagues had it not been wind-aided. It took them until April 15 to hit their second. Even now, 24 games into the season, they have only 10, four coming in the span of a week from Mike Moustakas, who has just 13 total hits — and a .159/.213/.354 line — all year. They have as many homers as a team as Jose Abreu does on his own. Their isolated power is .001 better than that of the Mets, and is in shouting distance of the worst mark we’ve seen in decades. They’re on pace for 67 homers. No one has hit fewer than 70 since the 1991 St. Louis Cardinals, who had only Todd Zeile break into double-digits with 11.

This isn’t a surprise. The Royals hit the fewest homers in the American League last year, and they tied with Minnesota for the fewest in 2012. This wasn’t built to be a powerful team, and it’s not.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes hitters are terse about their craft. They aren’t all Joey Votto, after all. But if you can pry a few thoughts from them, you’ll still find multitudes underneath seemingly simple statements. At least, that’s what happened after a conversation I had with Prince Fielder last week.

Before a game against the Athletics on April 22nd, I pointed out to the Rangers’ slugger that he makes more contact than most power hitters. “I’m making more contact on pitches that I want to swing at,” Fielder said of maturing as a hitter. The average top-30 home run hitter since 2011 has swung and missed at nearly 11% of the pitches he’s seen. Fielder’s swinging strike rate over the same time frame is 8.7%.

But things have changed in this regard over his career. Over his first four seasons, he struck out 19% of the time and swung and missed more than 11% of the time. Over his last four seasons, he’s struck out 14.5% of the time, thanks to that reduced swinging strike rate.

Ask the slugger, and the answer why seems so simple: “Trying to be ready to hit,” he offered with a shrug before asking: “Being more selective?” His reach rates haven’t improved much, though. In the first four years of his career, he swung at 27.4% of pitches outside the zone and 69.1% of pitches inside the zone. The last four years, he’s swung at 30.4% of pitches outside the zone and 67.7% of pitches inside the zone. Strange way to become more selective.

What Fielder has done is swung less as he’s aged — down from 47-48% to around 44-45%. There’s some evidence that swinging less is good for you, even without slicing it into swinging more at pitches inside the zone and less at pitches outside the zone. The Twins are trying this approach out currently.

But let’s look at this brute force stat — swing% — on an individual level. Since 2011, there have been 233 qualified batters. Take a look at how the top 50 and bottom 50 in swing percentage have done against each over that time frame.

Read the rest on FoxSports.com.

Last year, the St. Louis Cardinals scored nearly five runs per game and bashed their way to the World Series. Okay, the pitching helped too, but the 2013 Cardinals were far better at scoring runs than any other NL team — the Rockies were #2 in the NL in runs scored, but were still 77 runs back — and that was their competitive advantage. And then, over the off-season, they replaced Pete Kozma with Jhonny Peralta, which is about as large of an offensive upgrade at a position as any team made over the winter. Sure, they lost Carlos Beltran, but he was replaced by Matt Adams, and swapping out David Freese for Kolten Wong didn’t appear to be a significant offensive downgrade.

The 2014 Cardinals aren’t exactly the same team as the 2013 Cardinals, but this is more of a tweaked line-up than an overhauled one, and the general core remains the same. And yet, after finishing third in the majors in run scoring last year, St. Louis currently finds themselves 28th in the majors this year, and has hit so poorly that the team has already made a few adjustments to their roster. So, what’s going on in the Gateway City?

Read the rest of this entry »

11:59

:

11:59

:

Read the rest of this entry »

As of 1997, when the the author visited the latter, just the Great Wall of China and Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island shared the distinction of being the only man-made structures visible from space. Visible from space neither then nor now — and also made by what the author’s wife regards as “half a man at best” — are the NERD scores one finds below.

Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by viscount of the internet Rob Neyer, and expanded at the request of nobody, NERD scores represent an attempt to summarize in one number (on a scale of 0-10) the likely aesthetic appeal or watchability, for the learned fan, of a player or team or game.

Read the rest of this entry »

The results of statistical studies are often intuitive, but quantifying our intuition can be useful. Last week, David Laurila published an interview with Carlos Beltran that reminded me of plate discipline data that Jeff Zimmerman and I discussed this off-season. First, Mr. Beltran on his approach:

I…concentrate on getting a pitch in an area I know I can handle. If it’s a pitch on the outside corner, I know I can’t do much with that pitch. Unless I have two strikes, I don’t want to swing at it. If it’s a pitch on the inside corner and I don’t have two strikes, I don’t want to swing at it. That’s a pitch where, even if I take a good hack, I feel I’m not going to do much with it. I have to look for a pitch out over the strike zone, in or away. Basically, near the middle.

Read the rest of this entry »

As I write this, it’s still early in the 2014 regular season. But, as I write this, Ervin Santana has one of baseball’s better adjusted ERAs. He has a top-five adjusted FIP and a top-10 adjusted xFIP. He has a top-10 strikeout rate, an upper-level strikeout/walk ratio and a top-five contact rate allowed. He’s been absolutely dominant against right-handed hitters, and he’s been only slightly less dominant against left-handed hitters. Santana was late to sign — and it took some injuries to get him to Atlanta — but through a handful of starts, Santana has demonstrated a new level of ability.

And, looking back, perhaps we were tipped off. Think about how you used to think about Ervin Santana. He was homer-prone — in your head and in the numbers — and he was an example of a fastball/slider starting pitcher. He never mastered a third pitch, so he never frequently threw a third pitch. And while his slider was good enough for him to get by, the limited repertoire set him a lower ceiling. Santana, we assumed, was a known entity. Then we heard something at the end of December.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Sam talk to Charlie Wilmoth about his new book about the Pirates and the psychology of Pirates fans.

Podcast (effectively-wild): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS