A little over a week ago broadcaster Jon Sciambi wrote a great piece at Baseball Prospectus about a conversation he had with Chipper Jones. Scaimbi noted that Chipper saw the second fewest fraction of first-pitch strikes in the majors, but in spite of this Chipper has reputation as a first-pitch hitter and thus, maybe, he would be better off laying of some of those first-pitch offerings. Sciambi then recounts how Chipper took a fat 91-mph first-pitch fastball and then turned to the broadcast booth and scowled Scaimbi. Click over to the link and check out a great picture of the scowl and generally a very good article.

Sciambi, who notes that he got the numbers from FanGraphs, was quoting F-Strike%, which is the fraction of at-bats for a batter (or pitcher) that start 0-1 or have the ball put in play on the first pitch (i.e., at-bats in which the batter swung at the first pitch or it was called a strike).

A closely related number, which I think also addresses this question but that we do not have on the site is the fraction of first pitches that are in the strike zone (regardless of whether they are swung at or called a strike). Chipper sees the second fewest number of first pitches in the zone. Using the pitchf/x zone the average is 42%, and Chipper’s 32% is second only to Prince Fielder.

So what is Chipper doing to those first pitches compared to the rest of the league and compared to all pitches he sees. These numbers are from the pitchf/x data so they might differ slightly from the Plate Discipline numbers here, which are from BIS. The ranks are out of the just over 300 players who saw more than 1000 pitches last year.

                          Swing Rate
When           Where   Average     Chipper     Rank
All Pitches     Zone      0.65       0.73      43th from top
First Pitches   Zone      0.41       0.67       8th from top

All Pitches     Out       0.32       0.23      16th from bottom 
First Pitches   Out       0.16       0.14     108th from bottom 

First off, looking at all pitches, Chipper is in the great position of swinging at an above average of pitches in the zone while a below average number out of the zone. That shows his amazing plate discipline: the ability to tell the difference between a pitch in and out of the zone, and swing at the former and take the later.

On first pitches all batters swing less often, at both in-zone and out-of-zone pitches. Chipper does as well, but to a much smaller extent. So much so that Chipper enters the top ten swing rate on first pitches in the zone, and on first pitches out of the zone he swings at almost a league average rate, a big jump compared to his tiny out of zone swing rate on all pitches.

So yes, Chipper does swing at a lot of first pitches compared to all batters, and especially compared to his normal pitch rate. He explained why this is to ‘Duk at Big League Stew saying:

“[Sciambi] was just talking about me being overly aggressive, but yet I still drew 100 walks last year. They get mad at me because I don’t take enough pitches. But if I’m drawing 100 walks and hitting .300 … ”

Jones finished the sentence with a shoulder shrug and I asked him to explain why it wasn’t possible for him to take the first pitch on a more frequent basis.

His response echoed the same argument he used with Sciambi.

“There are certain pitchers, quite frankly, that you can’t get behind,” Jones said. “You want to be aggressive and the first hittable fastball that you get is the pitch you want to put in play. Because they’ll bury you if they get ahead of you. You can’t let them do that.

I really liked this exchange. A broadcaster who has the knowledge and curiosity to dig into stats that other might consider arcane and also access to players asks a very germane about those stats to a player. From there a well-connected blogger can ask the player further and get him to explain those numbers. I think it shows the future of sabermetric-based reporting.

At the risk of Edwin Jackson overexposure I wanted to look at one more thing that piqued my curiosity when I was putting together my post last Thursday. Guys who predominately throw sliders and fastballs are typically relievers because of their trouble getting out opposite-handed batters, so I was interested to see how Jackson handles lefties.

His splits are interesting. Although his xFIP shows the split you would expect — 4.63 against RHBs and 5.05 against LHBs — his FIP is actually better against lefties, 4.87 to RHBs versus 4.57 to LHBs. The reason is the big difference in HR/FB rate: 12% against RHBs and 7.5% against LHBs. That is with over 330 innings logged against each. A pitcher’s ability to control his HR/FB is still a pretty open question, and his ability to control HR/FB differentially against lefties and righties even more so. But so far in his career a big part of Jackson’s game against lefties is HR prevention.

Slicing the data any further is dangerous because of sample size issues, but I wanted see whether a specific pitch type was responsible for this difference. So I looked at his HR/FB by handedness and pitch type:

HR/FB
           RHB     LHB   
Fastball  0.153   0.057
Slider    0.100   0.073
Change    0       0.233
Curve     0       0

Remember he very rarely throws anything but his slider and fastball to RHBs, so ignore those last two. And even against LHBs that change is thrown rarely, so put little stock in that number also. The most striking difference, and backed up by the most number of pitches, is the difference off fastballs. A fly ball off his fastball from a LHBs is three times less likely to leave the park than from a righty.

What is going on here? How can he get such a low rate against LHBs and can we expect a rate nearly that low going forward? Here I look at the location of his fastballs to LHBs compared to all RHPs’ fastballs to LHBs. I broke the zone into bins and then color coded the bins. Red indicates zones where Jackson gets a greater fraction of his fastballs, and blues a smaller fraction.

It looks like Jackson hits the middle-away part of the plate pretty well. I think this, coupled with the speed of his fastball, is the key to his HR prevention against LHBs. These blazing fastballs on the outside of the plate are the hardest pitches to pull, and thus get any power off of.

I was listening to yesterday’s excellent FanGraphs Audio with Carson, Jack and Matt, and they brought up Edwin Jackson. In the episode, they noted Jackson’s soaring O-swing rate last year; wondered whether that had to do with his increased slider percentage; and also considered his strikingly good pitch-value numbers on his slider versus the poor ones for his fastball, in spite of that fastball’s blazing, fourth-fastest 94.5 MPH average speed. I thought those interesting observations warranted further investigation.

First off Jackson is effectively a two-pitch pitcher, rare for a starting pitcher. To RHBs he throws his fastball 60% of the time and slider 37%. Righties rarely see his curve or change. Against LHBs he throws these tertiary and quaternary offerings a little more often, but not by much, going with his fastball 67% of time and slider 20%. So even LHBs see a fastball or slider nearly 9 times out of 10.

As Matt noted, his slider percentage increased last year, from roughly 20% in 2006-2008 to 27% in 2009. This is the big reason for his increased O-Swing%. His out-of-zone sliders get swung at 37% of the time versus 26% of his out-of-zone fastballs. (These are for the pitchf/x zone, which is a little bigger than the BIS zone used for our plate discipline section, so these numbers do not correspond perfectly). The increased use of the slider neatly corresponds to his increased O-Swings.

Like most pitchers, Jackson throws his slider more often when he is ahead and less often when he is behind in the count. In these situations there was little change in slider use in 2009. The increase in sliders came early in at-bats: in 0-0, 1-0, 0-1 and 1-1 counts Jackson threw almost a third more sliders in 2009 than previously, which accounted for the majority of the increase. So it looks like Jackson was more comfortable going to the slider earlier in at-bats and even often starting off with one.

Finally what is going on with his fastball? It seems like dialing up the speed is just not enough. On the average fastball a batter misses with 14% of his swings, against Jackson’s fastballs just 12%. And when the average fastball is put into play, it gives up a slugging of .521, but Jackson’s is .556.

Almost all pitchers need to throw a fastball at the very least 50% of the time to keep batters honest and get strikes, but it would be interesting to see whether Jackson can continue to decrease his fraction of fastballs and increase his fraction of sliders. His 27% in 2009 was already 6th most in the Bigs, but maybe he can push it north of 30% as Ryan Dempster and Brett Anderson have.

Yesterday I looked at David Ortiz’s decline in plate discipline values. Today I am going to turn to his power numbers. Because of Ortiz’s inclusion on the leaked 2003 list of players who tested positive for performance-enhancing substances, any discussion of his power is going to turn to speculation based on that, but I am not particularly interested in covering that angle and prefer to focus on his numbers.

Ortiz’s power decline has come in a very particular manner. Look at his ISO to each field over the years. His peak years were 2003 to 2007 before his decline began in 2008.

            ISO
       left  center  right
2003   .327   .310   .429
2004   .260   .380   .449
2005   .223   .345   .493
2006   .260   .460   .533
2007   .280   .272   .444
2008   .256   .196   .383
2009   .290   .331   .276

In his peak Ortiz showed a typical left-handed power-hitter split with his biggest power coming to right field. In the past two years, interestingly, his power to left and center held steady while to right it has fallen off. His loss of power has been almost exclusively a decrease in power of pulled balls in play. Showing it graphically (with the number the fraction of balls in the air to each region and the shading the slugging on those):

The fraction of those to deep right and the slugging on those balls in play has fallen off in the past two years, while the fraction of balls in play to the infield and just beyond has risen.

It is interesting that Ortiz has lost power to right while he has tried to swing more at inside pitches, which he would typically pull. It could be that as Ortiz has lost some power to right he has tried to compensate by swinging at more inside pitches in an attempt to get the big pull power on them.

One encouraging sign, as a commenter to yesterday’s post pointed out, is that after a horrid April and May, Ortiz had a much better June through September.

Generally, though, I find it interesting that his power to center and left has been largely unaffected and wonder how that compares to other aging sluggers.

As the Red Sox stocked up on defensive players and pitching this winter a common question has been, “Do the Sox have enough offense to beat the Yankees?” As we have talked about here, this question is wrongheaded. Teams do not need a baseline level of offense (or defense or pitching). They simply need to score more runs then they give up. A run saved is just as valuable as a run scored.

That is not to say that the Red Sox would not like to score a ton of runs. And one place they will hope to get more production from this year is the DH and David Ortiz. Ortiz had a down year in 2009: a wRC+ of 104 just doesn’t cut it from a DH. People have focused on Ortiz’s power drop, but equally troubling were his lowest walk rate since 2004 and highest strikeout rate since 1998. Those lead to his pedestrian .332 OBP, taking away a huge chunk of his offensive value.

The problem is that Ortiz has been swinging at an increasing percentage of pitches out of the zone. In 2004 he swung at a very low 15.2% of such pitches. But it has increased every year since to 22.6% in 2009. (Average is 25%, so he is still better than average but closing in). Using the swing and contact contours from my Marco Scutaro post we can see where those extra swings have been.

This shows a big increase to swing rate on up-and-in pitches. Although he made slightly more contact on these pitches in 2009 than 2007-2008, these are still pitches that he whiffs at a high rate. In addition, the region where he makes contact 90% or more of the time was much smaller in 2009. Swinging at more pitches out of the zone (up-and-in pitches) and making less contact on pitches in the heart of the plate resulted in Ortiz’s poorer strikeout and walk numbers.

It looks like most of my fellow writers are more sensible than I, and have moved on from constant attention to the two-week-old Fangraphs’ splits. But I cannot help myself: as a pitchf/x-er I have a fondness for Tim Wakefield and I had always remembered hearing that the knuckleball does not have a platoon split. So it was something I had to check out.

Since 2002 Wake has posted an xFIP of 4.79 against LHBs and an xFIP of 4.73 against RHBs — not much of a split. His FIP actually shows a reverse split: 4.38 against LHBs and 4.73 against RHBs. The interesting aspect is that the components show rather large — but complementary — splits.

Looking just at strikeout and walks Wakefield does much better against righties, with 6.56 K/9, 2.78 BB/9 against RHBs and 5.52 K/9, 3.34 BB/9 against LHBs. That would portend an big split. But once the ball is in play the story changes. Righties have a BABIP of .286, with 38% GB and 10.5% HR/FB. Lefties a .264 BABIP, with 42% GB and 8% HR/FB. So lefties are hitting a lower BABIP; more ground balls, so fewer flies; and a lower percentage of those flies make it over the fence. In every way lefties make poorer contact against Wakefield.

I thought that maybe this had to do with Wakefield throwing his pitches in different percentages to RHBs and LHBs. But his numbers a very similar, against both about 85% knucklers,10% fastballs and 5% curves.

So the difference must be in how LHBs and RHBs deal with his knuckleball, and the per-pitch numbers bear this out. Righties whiff on his knuckler more often (20% versus 16%) and swing at more of them out of the zone (27% versus 25%), but when they hit it they make much better contact (.512 slugging on contact versus .435). I don’t know whether this is a difference in approach — righties go up there looking to knock one out of the park while lefties just look to make contact, but I don’t know why that would be — or whether it has to do with how lefties versus righties pick up as it is delivered or what is causing this difference. Anyway it is one more in a long list of wonderful mysteries of the knuckle ball.

Put it all together and Wakefield probably has a slight reverse split. His FIP, which would credit the difference in HR/FB as real while xFIP would ignore the difference, is better against lefties. And that does not credit him for his very low BABIP against LHBs, which after so many batters faced is probably a real difference and makes his performance agianst LHBs even better than his FIP would suggest.

But anyway you look at it the platoon split is pretty small. All else equal if you have two guys and one spot in the rotation and one spot in the pen you would give the rotation spot to the guy with the smaller platoon split — thus opposing managers could not take advantage of it in lineup creation and you could leverage the bigger split of the guy in the bullpen. So that is one argument for putting Wakefield in the rotation. But all else is not equal and, even accounting for Wake’s splitless-ness, there are probably five better starters than Wakefield on Boston’s depth chart. Anyway the point will probably be moot, as there is little chance all six pitchers are healthy at the same time and Wake will get his share of starts and we shall all rejoice.

I often find inspiration for my article in the words of my fellow writers, as their insightful observations give rise to further questions for me. Anyway, today is no different, as I am particularly intrigued by Dave Cameron’s observations about the components of a platoon split. The platoon split is clearly seen in fielding-independent measures like strikeout, walk, and ground-ball rate, but Dave C. found (via David Appelman) that there is only a slight platoon split for BABIP and HR/FB, a couple of points for the former and tenths of a percent for the latter.

Dave then questioned whether this general rule is the case for all pitchers, particularly if you have a pitcher who throws for a non-standard arm slot. He brought up a handful of guys. Since I had written about Vicente Padilla before and had his data laying around, I thought he would be an interesting test case.

Padilla has enormous xFIP split (5.11 versus LHBs and 3.83 versus RHBs) which comes from his K, BB and GB% platoon splits, but beyond that he also has a slight HR/FB split and a huge BABIP split (.324/.273). Going forward should we expect him to have just a slight difference in his BABIP against LHBs and HRBs like most pitchers, or is there something different about Padilla?

First off, Padilla does not have a great pitch against LHBs. He has a rarely thrown, ineffective changeup/splitter and even his okay curve shows a pretty big platoon split (while most curves do not). So against LHBs, he is left throwing his fastballs — two- and four-seam — 70% of the time to LHBs, and, of those, over 75% are his four-seam fastball. That four-seam fastball shows a big platoon split in BABIP, .280 against RHBs and .330 versus LHBs. Where does this come from? The BABIP of a pitch depends on a number of things, but the pitch’s horizontal location plays an important role. So I looked at that relationship for Padilla’s and the average RHP’s four-seam fastballs.

For most pitchers the BABIP of a four-seam fastball decreases the further inside the pitch is. Against RHBs Padilla has a similar trend, but generally his fastball have a much lower BABIP than average. Against LHBs on the outside his BABIP is similar, but on inside pitches, instead of dropping off, it picks back up. So it looks like, for some reason, LHBs can make solid, high-BABIP contact on Padilla’s inside fastballs. Whether this has to do with Padilla’s delivery or the movement on his fastball or whether the result is just noise is unclear. In all, I think Padilla’s problem against LHBs stems from not having a solid off-speed pitch and a four-seam fastball that — maybe because he cannot go inside against lefties — displays an out-sized platoon split compared to average.

In the comments to Dave Cameron’s Joe Mauer post last week a commenter, Temo, suggested Joey Votto as a player with similar opposite-field power. I thought it would be interesting to check him out, partially as a comparison to Mauer, but also because I think Votto does not get enough attention.

Last year Votto had the fourth-highest wOBA baseball. Obviously he benefits from his home park and we do not have the wRC+ leader boards yet, but I went and checked the fifteen guys after him and saw that the only one who gets pumped ahead is Adrain Gonzalez. So on a rate basis Votto was the fifth-best hitter even taking to account his home park.

So how did he do it? It starts with a good number of walks and solid power. The power, as Temo noted, is great to left — opposite field for the left-handed Votto. To left he has an ISO of .450, but has fairly good power to center, .226, and right, .298. So he is no slouch to any field.

Just as interesting as his opposite-field power though is his amazing .373 BABIP, good for sixth best in the league. Looking at the BABAIP split out by batted-ball type the amazing thing is his BABIP on fly balls, .291. The average BABIP on fly balls in the NL in 2009 was .142. So Votto gets hits on his non-HR fiy balls at a rate double that of the average non-HR fly and higher than a good number of hitters do on all their balls in play.

How can nearly three of ten of Votto’s non-HR fly balls drop for hits? Here I look at Votto’s non-HR flies by field location. As in my Cust post, the numbers are the fractions of non-HR fly balls to each location and the color the BABIP: from red being over one half to gray being zero.

The first thing is that Votto hits very few infield flies compared to the average LHB, actually the third fewest in the league. This cuts down on automatic outs. Additionally he hits way more flies to deep and mid-distance left field, which fall in for hits at a very good rate. This shows how readily and successfully he goes the opposite way, which I think is a big reason for his high BABIP on fly balls.

He probably will not have a BABIP of over .370 next year, but it will most likely be quite high. This great BABIP coupled with his great — and opposite-field fueled — power and his walks result in one of the game’s best young hitters.

There were so many good questions raised in the comments section of my post yesterday on Aaron Hill that I thought addressing some of them deserved a follow-up post. The bulk of the questions come from former BtB overlord Sky Kalkman:

Would love to see some further breakdowns. Did Hill see more or fewer pitches over each part of the plate (or outside)? Did he see different types of pitches, and different locations of different pitches? Did he swing at certain pitches/locations more often or less often? Did pitchers’ approaches change throughout the year?

Addressing Sky’s first point:

Yes, it does seem that pitchers pitch farther outside to Hill. The peak location is a good third of a foot farther away from Hill than to the average righty. Based on the results of yesterday’s post, this is a good idea: Hill crushes those inside pitches.

Skipping to Kalkman’s question about whether Hill swings at certain locations of pitches more than others:

Generally Hill has a higher swing rate than average righty and this is partially true for middle-in pitches, but as pitches get farther away from him he swings at about league-average rate. So it does look like Hill swings more often at the inside pitches that he has the most success with.

Sky’s last question was, “Did pitchers’ approaches change throughout the year?” This is very interesting. If you look at Hill’s FB% numbers you can see that he has been seeing fewer and fewer fastballs since 2006. But if you split it out by month for 2009:

March/April  .525
May          .550
June         .519
July         .572
August       .596
Sept./Oct.   .590

For some reason, in July, pitchers reversed this trend. After he had already crushed 19 HRs through the first half of the year pitchers started throwing fastballs to him more often. I poked around some more, but could not find a big change in where those pitches were thrown. This is an interesting trend and something that could be looked into further.

Ewan, another commenter, suggests:

One thing I noticed about watching Hill a lot last season is he is very good at fouling off pitches on the outer half for someone his size and who used a heavier bat. Because of this he almost forces the pitcher to throw him something a bit more hittable.

Here is the fouls per pitch by horizontal location:

This does not look to be the case. Hill does foul off a lot of inside pitches — which makes sense because he pulls them so much — but on outside pitches he fouls off pitches at about a league-average rate.

Finally, Vivaelpujols had a great suggestion:

Maybe you could also chart the vertical location in the strike zone, as a function of the depth of the plate. So home runs on pitches around 3.5 pz would extend to the furthest part of the square part of the plate. Home runs on pitches at 1.5 pz would only extend to the front of the plate.

What do you all think? I like it. Most of his HRs are in a fairly narrow band, but he has that one HR that was relatively up in the zone.

Thanks to all the commenters for their insightful observations and questions. Obviously even this still just scratches the surface. I have ignored an analysis of the height of the pitches, beyond this most recent HR graph; looking at performance and location of each pitch type separately; and a host of other questions.

As soon as I heard about the new split data at FanGraphs I had one thought: Aaron Hill. Maybe not everyone’s first thought, but if you recall, the surprise third-leading AL HR hitter pulled his HRs like crazy. Dave C. had a post about it, you could see it over at HitTracker, and I reproduce the data for you here:

Crazy. Not only almost all pulled, but most extremely so and no HRs on pitches on the outer quarter of the plate. That one HR to right was off Joba Chamberlain on July 5th at Yankee Stadium. Thanks to the indispensable HitTracker we know that the 369-foot shot was a home run thanks to the short porch in right at Yankee Stadium and would not have made it out of any other park. So even that one opposite-field HR hardly counts, which also discounts one of his few HRs on a pitch on the outer half of the plate.

So what do Hill’s 2009 spray-chart splits look like?

 Hill
              ISO   wOBA   HR/FB
 to Left     .410   .503   .443
 to Center   .127   .317   .042
 to Right    .078   .240   .013
 
 Average RHB
              ISO   wOBA   HR/FB
 to Left     .282   .419   .272
 to Center   .126   .340   .054
 to Right    .124   .279   .028

They do not disappoint. To his pull (left) field Hill is nearly the equal of Mark Reynolds or Russell Branyan to their pull fields (the examples are pulled from Dave C.’s post about power to all fields and, to be fair, those guys are noted for their even power to all fields, but still Aaron Hill has just slightly less power to left than Mark Reynolds does). To right, though, he has much less power than the average RHB, so much so that — and remember this is the AL batter with the third most HRs in 2009 — an opposite field ball in play from Hill had the same ISO as the average David Eckstein ball in play. Yikes.

So Hill has enormous power when he pulls the ball, how does this power look as a function of where he he is pitched?

Although the pattern is not surprising I think the extent of it is. Hill’s power reaches its peak about a half farther inside than the average RHB and it only drops off slightly as you move in from there. The drop off is so slight that he has more power on pitches right on the inner edge of the plate than the average RHB has on a pitch down the fat of the plate. That is not to say I think this is his true talent; as with all stats, if we want to predict how he will do in 2010 it would be best to regress this back to average some. Still, I think it is safe to say Hill should crush inside pitches in 2010 even though it may not be to the same extent as it was in 2009.