FG on Fox: Maybe Hitters Are Being Too Passive
I’m going to begin this column with an unremarkable looking fact.
When a Major League hitter has swung at the first pitch of an at-bat in 2014, the average OPS in that at-bat — not just OPS on first pitch swings, but the OPS for all at-bats in which there was a first pitch swing — is .710. The average OPS for an at-bat in which the batter does not swing is .708. For all intents and purposes, that is a statistical tie, and suggests that there has been no obvious advantage to pursuing either approach this year.
Here’s why that unremarkable looking fact actually is remarkable; if this lasts, it would mark the first season ever recorded — as far back as Baseball-Reference’s data for that split goes anyway, which for this specific number is 1988 — where the OPS on at-bats with a first pitch swing was higher than the OPS on at-bats with a first pitch take. For most of the last 25 years, it hasn’t even been close.
From 1988 to 2011, the advantage of the first-pitch take was consistent and constant. Sure, there were years where the advantage wasn’t enormous — in 2001, the gap in OPS was only seven points, and it was just nine points in 2004 — but the blue line and red line never really came that close to intersecting until 2012. That year, the gap fell to just two points, which still stands as the lowest recorded advantage for the first-pitch take over a full season in the last 25 years. Last year, the advantage jumped back up to six points, but that was still lower than any season prior to 2012. And now this year, the gap has not only disappeared, but it’s reversed course for the first time.
Read the rest on FoxSports.com.
Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.
Is it significant that the gap seems to have narrowed significantly right around 2001 when MLB started measuring the strike zone with Questec?
Really good stuff, Dave. I understand that players take the first pitch in order to work the count, but I cringe whenever that first pitch is a meatball right down the middle and they don’t swing. On Mets broadcasts, you can sometimes hear the exasperated sigh of Keith Hernandez whenever this happens.
I am a little surprised that you used OPS instead of wOBA, though I’m guessing that may be because the audience at Fox is more familiar with OPS than wOBA. This makes me wonder if you see the same result in OBP and SLG separately when taking the first pitch. If one is going up and the other is going down, then you might not see that change if you’re going by OPS.
What I also wonder about is the quality of the hitters in the timeframes you’re suggesting. Being more aggressive on first pitch isn’t going to help if there’s a measurably smaller number of hitters who know how to make good contact on that first pitch.
Take my beloved Mariners for example. Given the overall anemic quality of their offense, watching them hackhackhack at the first pitch does not seem like it’s going to be any better than them watching the first pitch go by. I.e. the article asserts that the OPS for swinging at first pitch v. taking first pitch is about the same, but given the quality of the hitters in the M’s lineup, they could be just exchanging called strike one for a swinging strike, or worse, rolling over on it or otherwise hitting it just wrong and grounding out in the first pitch.
The A’s defy this trend. They sit on the only BB% over 10%, and the second highest wRC+ in the league, although the pitching staff definitely puts an emphasis on FPS’s.