On Friday, I talked about the current iteration of the Royals, and their propensity toward making contact on a lot of pitches outside the strike zone. In one of the graphs I created, I presented the relationship between O-Contact% and ISO. After some spirited comments on the article about the lack of correlation (given the small sample size and lack of R2), I got to thinking: What is the actual relationship between the percentage of times a batter makes contact on pitches outside of the strike zone (O-Contact%) and offensive production, especially power?

We know certain facts related to the topic of the impact of plate discipline statistics — like players that swing at more pitches out of the strike zone tend to have lower walk rates — but today we’re interested in just O-Contact% and the headline maker, power. This is in large part due to my sometimes unhealthy fascination with the Royals of the past few years, who have been known for winning (at least last year) while not exactly crushing the ball. They only hit 20 home runs through the first 43 games of 2014 and were dead last in ISO (.113) at the end of the season. They also came within a game of winning the World Series, because baseball.

While the Royals might make a great case study, we shouldn’t be too quick to jump to conclusions given their unusual plate discipline statistics and lack of power: we should let the much larger sample size I’m about to go over tell the story. We’re going to focus on two statistics today in relationship to plate discipline: one is ISO, so we can look at raw power, and the other is wOBA, so we can have a look at a more general, catch-all measure of offensive value. Then we’re going to look at a player who truly stands out in the data.

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You might expect the Kansas City Royals to have a big offseason after their fabled run to the World Series that reignited a love of baseball in the entire region of Missouri which doesn’t root for the Cardinals. Maybe they would sign someone to fill the offensive power void and boost run production, or try to extend James Shields, who was hitting free agency. That didn’t happen. Instead, their offseason can be summed up by the front office giving 17 million dollars to Kendrys Morales, which is still a surprisingly strange sentence to type, even a few months after the deal.

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Navigate to Ron Wolforth’s website and you’ll immediately see this.

Normally I’m hesitant to engage with places that approach me like I’m watching the pitching equivalent of QVC at 4 a.m., but Ron Wolforth has the track record to make bold statements: he’s worked with Trevor Bauer since the first round pick was 14 years old, and most recently he took Scott Kazmir from out of baseball to pumping mid-90’s gas for Cleveland in the span of a year. That second achievement is what we’re going to pay attention to today, because the news came down this past week that the Oakland Athletics signed Barry Zito to a minor league deal with an invitation to spring training. Why is this of specific interest to us, you may ask? Because Zito has been working with Wolforth for the past four months to completely revamp his delivery and regain his lost velocity. The most recent reports say Zito is throwing in the high-80’s after the training, with Wolforth guaranteeing 90 MPH by “April or May”.

Ron Wolforth is more scientist than scout – the type of outsider that the baseball establishment views with a sideways look. His reputation improved with Bauer getting drafted in the first round in 2011 (he even secured an invitation to spring training with Cleveland in 2013 after Bauer was traded from the Diamondbacks), but the feeling you get is that he’s still not completely trusted – that his methods are out of keeping with the entrenched mentality of the game’s established coaches. The same resistance to intellectual approaches that kept sabermetrics out of the game (and still does in some circles) is part of what is keeping Wolforth out of it.

That’s where Barry Zito comes in. There are differences in Kazmir and Zito’s cases: there is the age difference — which is nearly five years — and the fact that Kazmir is a power pitcher while Zito is known more for relying on secondary offerings. The fact remains, however, that both have one major thing in common: they were out of baseball, struggling with an almost total loss of fastball velocity, and turned to Ron Wolforth for help. Kazmir was written off; he regained almost ten MPH and made it back. Can Zito follow the same path? Read the rest of this entry »

Pitchers are expected to lose command after Tommy John surgeries. Prolific base stealers coming back from hamstring injuries are expected to take it slow for a week or two before regularly getting the green light on the basepaths. A broken finger for a slugger is blamed for the loss of power; a blister for a pitcher might mean a loss of feel on their breaking ball. What is not well publicized, however, is how a player recovers from and reacts to returning from a concussion. For an injury that has been talked about in the media so often in the last few years, we know very little about the actual long-term, statistical impacts that concussions have on players that experience them.

Players often talk about being “in a fog” for some time after suffering a concussion – often even after they return to play. The act of hitting is a mechanism that involves identifying, reacting, and deciding on a course of action within half a second. With that in mind, I wondered: do concussions change the quality of a batter’s eye and discipline at the plate? Do brain injuries add milliseconds to those individual steps? Even though each injury is different, do varying lengths of disabled list stints due to concussions change a player’s performance on the field after they return? The most direct route to answering those questions might be studying the impact of concussions on strikeout and walk rates.

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Winter ball in Puerto Rico wrapped up at the end of January, with Javier Baez attempting to improve his plate discipline problems after a short stint in the majors at the end of 2014. That stint, as most of us are aware, featured him striking out 41% of the time he came to the plate. Unfortunately, Baez didn’t seem to improve that aspect of his game very much while playing for the Cangrejeros de Santurce, as he went 11-43 with five walks and 21 strikeouts during the regular winter season. For those without a calculator handy, that’s a 44% strikeout rate. His walk rate improved to 10% (6.6% in 2014 MLB), so we can say there was some positive news to be claimed from his time there.

We have barely enough plate appearances for Baez from the winter league to know whether these rate statistics actually hold water, and it certainly doesn’t bode well that Baez struck out so often in Puerto Rico against the quasi-equivalent of AAA pitching talent. He managed to strike out less often in the winter league playoff games, going 13-64 with four walks and 18 strikeouts – a 26% strikeout rate that again is from a small sample size, and still not great, but an improvement. The Cubs decided to pull the plug on him in winter ball after the playoffs, preventing him from playing in the Caribbean Series after Santurce won the Puerto Rican Championship. If we combine the regular winter season and playoffs, we get this line for Baez:

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