Don’t Mistake Passivity for Judgment

Last week, I wrote about the careers of the two former college baseball players who have been featured on this season of Love Is Blind, and don’t worry, I’m not going to follow up with a detailed breakdown of their performance on the episodes released this past weekend. (Though if anyone wants the short version: It’s been pretty dire. Ben is getting flamed on TikTok so bad his fiancée is thinking about pulling the plug, while Dave… I don’t know what you’re doing, man. Get it together. You’re in your mid-30s. You should be able to have a frank, productive conversation with your partner.)

I bring all this up because it’s been hard to shake something I mentioned in Friday’s article: Ben Mezzenga’s astonishingly high incidence of taking strike three. In his best years, only about half of his strikeouts came swinging. A typical big league hitter strikes out three times swinging for every time he strikes out looking. Last year, José Ramírez ran a ratio north of 15-to-1, the highest mark in baseball. Cavan Biggio was the only hitter who had 50 or more strikeouts with more than half of them coming with the bat on his shoulder.

For those of you who came here because you think FanGraphs is now a reality TV message board (it isn’t so far, but I’m working on it): Ramírez is one of the best hitters — indeed, best all-around players — in baseball. Last season, he hit .279/.335/.537 with 39 home runs and 39 doubles. That was good enough to land him fifth in AL MVP voting; in nine full major league seasons, he’s finished in the top five in the AL MVP race six times, and in the top 10 eight times.

In the interest of not writing anything indecorous, I’ll sum up Biggio’s game by saying he’s not as good a hitter as Ramírez. Looking at those two outliers, you’d think that when your Little League coach was yelling at you to get the bat off your shoulder with two strikes, they weren’t just trying to move the game along; they were actually giving good advice.

That flies in the face of sabermetric wisdom from a generation ago, when we glorified hitters who drew walks and swung their bats sparingly. As data collection and research techniques have improved, we’ve come to understand that aggressive hitters can be devastatingly effective, especially if they understand what they’re swinging at. Nowadays, hitters like Mezzenga might be described more accurately as passive, rather than disciplined or selective.

Let’s look at the top and bottom 10 in swinging strikeout rate to see if that pejorative description reflects results.

Yeah, not really. In fact, José Ramírez is the only hitter out of these 20 who I’d call exceptionally good. You’ve got a couple other decent hitters, including a couple who bump up against All-Star level when they’re on, but no other superstars.

Here’s how all 300-odd hitters with 50 or more strikeouts fared, when graphing swinging strikeout rate vs. wOBA.

A resounding victory for the null hypothesis. There is basically no correlation between swinging strikeout rate and wOBA. The mean and median swinging strikeout rate are 76.4% and 76.9%, respectively. Out of the 20 players with the best wOBAs on the list, 15 have a swinging strikeout rate within one standard deviation of the mean. Kyle Tucker (63.0%) and Carlos Correa (63.9%) came in low; Bryce Harper (85.5%), Bobby Witt Jr. (85.8%), and Kerry Carpenter (86.7%) came in high.

And in case the graph didn’t convince you, I ran a couple statistical significance checks for swinging strikeout rate and wOBA, and my computer started laughing at me. There’s more than one way to hit, it turns out. In fact, the same is basically true of overall strikeout rate. Big league pitchers know what they’re doing, and they’re gonna getcha, whether you swing with two strikes or not.

Out of the stats I checked, only two showed even the faintest flicker of statistical significance. Overall strikeout rate is almost completely unaffected by the manner of those punchouts, but walk rate goes down as swinging strikeout rate goes up.

Which is obvious. The less you swing with two strikes — the less you swing in any count, for that matter — the more you’re going to walk. All sorts of other bad stuff might happen if you don’t swing, sure, but you’re going to walk more.

One way to get around not walking so much is to hit the ball hard. Here’s swinging strikeout rate graphed against HardHit%.

The statistical correlation here is tenuous at best. But hitters who make hard contact are very slightly more likely to strike out swinging.

Only three hitters with a HardHit% more than one standard deviation above the mean also had a swinging strikeout rate more than a standard deviation below the mean: James Wood, Lars Nootbaar, and Eloy Jiménez. Three times as many hitters were a standard deviation above the mean for both HardHit% and swinging strikeout rate, including Harper, Witt, Francisco Lindor, and Teoscar Hernández.

What’s the point of all this? Well, don’t confuse a low swing rate for discipline and judgment. But I guess you would’ve known that already if you’d been watching Love Is Blind.