Have Pitchers Adjusted to Jose Bautista?

by
October 1, 2010

With 54 home runs in all, Jose Bautista has hit at least 11 home runs in May, July, August, and September. He is crushing fastballs in particular, with 2.63 fastball runs above average according to his pitch type values. He is doing a lot of damage against sliders and curveballs as well, both of which pitches he was below average at hitting in previous years. Say what you want about Bautista’s sudden power surge this season as he’s on his way to age 30, but his spectacular increase in wSL/C and wCB/C tells me that he has learned how to hit breaking balls better this season, which at least contributes to the increase in power in some form.

But how have pitchers responded to Bautista as the season went on? Let’s first take a look at a few of Bautista’s plate discipline and pitch outcome statistics broken down by month in 2010. (Edit: Note that I am using MLBAM data, so the following season stats are estimated differently from the ones on Bautista’s FanGraphs page, which are from BIS data.):

Since this is broken down by month, we’ll have to remember that the sample size is small, so don’t take these numbers too literally. Still, July may very well have been Bautista’s best month because of these stats. He made contact on 37.1% of all pitches, the most for any month in 2010, partly due to swinging the bat the highest percentage of the time as well. He was able to put the ball in play 20% of the time and rarely whiffed. He batted an MVP-like .347/.418/.765 in July compared to a .262/.381/.625 for the season. In the next table, let’s take a look at how pitchers have adjusted by the month in the location of their pitches, broken down by pitch type as well:

The first column shows first strike percentage by month, which has been up and down through out the the season. These don’t correlate directly with his slugging percentage though, especially when you compare April with July. However, Zone% decreased from 55.8% in April to 49.7% in August. Pitchers are throwing many fewer fastballs in the zone, in particular in September, compared to earlier in the season. Some of the other pitch types have decreased in Zone% but increased again later in the season, so I am not sure what is going here. Again, sample size is probably an issue, as Bautista has not seen more than 100 pitches of each non-fastball pitch type in any given month.

Still, it’s telling that the F-Strike% and Zone% of all pitches in September is much lower than it was in April.

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Albert Lyu (@thinkbluecrew, LinkedIn) is a graduate student at the Georgia Institute of Technology, but will always root for his beloved Northwestern Wildcats. Feel free to email him with any comments or suggestions.

19 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Sinkerballer
16 years ago

“Have pitchers adjusted to Jose Bautista?”

Shame on them if they haven’t…

0
Giancarlo
16 years ago

btw, don’t forget Bautista was batting leadoff for most of the month of April, so he obviously gets pitched differently, while he was taking a different approach back then. When Fred Lewis arrived and Snider hit the DL, Bautista moved lower in the order, which was around May.

Personally, from what I’ve seen all season, the pitch Bautista struggles the most with, is the change up. According to his new stance, it’s easy for him to pick up the spin on the ball. However, the changeup’s similarity to the FB makes it difficult for him to pick up. Only pitch I’ve seen him struggle with.

1
Albert Lyu
16 years ago
Reply to  Giancarlo

Good point, I definitely should have mentioned that, you’re right that it changes how pitchers pitch to him.

0
Elwin
16 years ago

It wasn’t until one of his last two home runs that Jose Bautista hit an opposite field home run. The first of his major league career. It seems with a split that extreme, there would be plenty for pitchers to exploit. It would be interesting to see a pitch f/x study on Bautista.

0
Darren
16 years ago

I was at the game on Tuesday and C.C. absolutely owned Jose with a steady diet of change ups that he looked very silly on. I am surprised more have not picked up on this.

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JOSE
16 years ago

JOSE BAUTISTA IS A BEAST! JOSE FOR MVP!!!!

0
Alberto
16 years ago

Pitchers will surely adjust to Bautista. But Bautista will also adjust to pitchers (i.e. how he gets so many walks).

0
Friendly neighborhood critic
16 years ago

Not trying to be a jerk, but this was an awful lot of text and graphics to show that pitchers appear to be throwing fewer fastballs in the zone, based on a weak month-to-month trend that’s probably confounded by sample size issues. I know that not every post can be an instant classic, but this one kind of oversold itself.

Also, is there a reason why some cells are green in the tables while others are orange?

2
Albert Lyu
16 years ago
Reply to  Friendly neighborhood critic

Thanks for the constructive criticism, I always welcome it. In general, I start a post before I even see the results of the data or graphs. I only scrap the post if the original question was not worth asking in the first place or if the results were truly insignificant. I think in this case, I was at least able to find some interesting conclusions, while noting the small sample sizes.

The cell highlighting is a habit of mine, but I wanted to group the different categories of stats.

0
Friendly neighborhood critic
16 years ago
Reply to  Albert Lyu

Thanks for taking the criticism well!

I don’t think that the finding was insignificant, but it would have been interesting to take it a bit further, if possible. What would it mean if pitchers were adjusting to him? His performance doesn’t seem to have been affected much, since he still hit a ton of HRs in September. To me, the biggest outlier seemed to be in April, where more of all kinds of pitches were in the zone.

Regarding the cell coloring, it would just help if you explained what the colors meant.

Cheers.

0
JoeIQ
16 years ago

Don’t question Jose Bautista. No one is worthy to look at his numbers.

0
George
16 years ago

Darren, pitchers have picked up on it. They are throwing Bautista more change-ups than ever before. The problem is…not a lot of pitchers can throw changes of the quality of CC Sabathia.

0
guy above me is a clown
16 years ago

albert lyu is solid writer

1
jsp2014
16 years ago
Reply to  guy above me is a clown

agreed. he has immediately jumped toward the top of the list of must-read fangraphs bloggers.

0
fjkagreklg
16 years ago
Reply to  George

Im surprised nobody has written about how incredibly good Marcum’s change is.

0
Joe
16 years ago

So what is the conclusion? Have pitchers adjusted to Bautista? Is this an open-ended question?

0
Westman
15 years ago

Got news for everybody. Jose Bautista is coming back down to earth in 2011. If I eat these words more power to him.

0
Heinrich
15 years ago

Jose had off-season hernia surgery. One could assume he played through this injury but for how long?
If he was bothered by this –why wouldn’t he be– this makes ’10 even more amazing.

0