Henderson Alvarez and Being Worse Than a Coin

You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting for this to happen. Sure, probably nobody else noticed that it happened, and Henderson Alvarez himself probably didn’t notice that it happened, but, let’s not be judgmental. You have your things, and I have mine. This is one of my things.

Let’s break hitting down to a level that’s so simple it barely even applies to real hitting in the first place. As a hitter, you want to hit the ball hard. To hit the ball hard, you want to maximize your swings at hittable pitches, and minimize your swings at less hittable pitches. The strike zone mostly captures the hittable pitches, and a pitch taken in the strike zone will count against you for a strike. So to make things excessively simple: you want hitters to swing at strikes, and you don’t want hitters to swing at balls. Generally, a swing at a strike is a good decision. Generally, a swing at a ball is a bad decision. The most disciplined hitters in baseball will swing at a lot more strikes than balls.

Conveniently, we can establish a discipline baseline. What’s the worst discipline one might ever expect? That would be an even blend of swings at strikes and swings at balls. That would suggest zero discipline at all, and that’s the approach we’d expect if swings were determined by flipping a coin. If everything were 50/50, a hitter would have an O-Swing% of 50% and a Z-Swing% of 50%. To somehow perform worse than that would hint at the existence of anti-discipline, which I don’t even know how I would explain.

Henderson Alvarez is best known for being a baseball pitcher. Because his employer’s in the National League, he also sometimes has to be a baseball hitter. This past season he came to the plate 67 times. Henderson Alvarez’s discipline was worse than a coin’s.

We’ve got PITCHf/x data stretching back to 2008. That’s not that long ago, but it at least gives us seven solid years of information. Over that era, there have been nearly 4,000 player-seasons of at least 50 plate appearances, 2014 Henderson Alvarez included. So let’s talk about that. Alvarez just posted the highest O-Swing% on record, and he beat second place by a full five percentage points. He beat second place in just this season by nearly ten percentage points. Yet Alvarez’s Z-Swing% — his rate of swings at pitches within the strike zone — places in the lowest 20th percentile. Against strikes, Alvarez was unusually passive. Against balls, Alvarez was unusually aggressive. When you put those things together, magic happens. Bad actual hitting happens, but statistical magic happens.

This is a table. I’ve created a statistic which is simply Z-Swing% – O-Swing%. Here are the ten lowest-ranking player-seasons, since 2008:

Rank	Season	Player	Z-Swing% – O-Swing%
1	2014	Henderson Alvarez	-9.3%
2	2012	Alberto Gonzalez	2.7%
3	2012	Lucas Harrell	3.5%
4	2014	Bartolo Colon	4.2%
5	2009	Jorge de la Rosa	5.2%
6	2009	Jon Garland	5.9%
7	2014	Brett Hayes	7.2%
8	2009	Eliezer Alfonzo	7.4%
9	2009	Paul Maholm	7.9%
10	2012	R.A. Dickey	8.0%

Alvarez is the first to pull it off. He’s the first player to have a decision-making process that underachieved a literally random decision-making process. And Alvarez didn’t simply finish in the negatives — he had a difference of more than nine percentage points. This is a man with an O-Swing% of 66%, and a Z-Swing% of 57%. Alvarez offered at balls twice as often as Dayan Viciedo. He offered at fewer strikes than Christian Yelich. In retrospect, the Marlins would’ve been better off making Alvarez’s decisions with a quarter in the dugout.

Courtesy of Baseball Savant, here is Alvarez’s 2014 swing/no-swing map, with his strike zone represented by a box:

There are swings close to the zone, and there are swings not close to the zone. For the record, I’m folding bunt attempts in with swings, because you can always pull back on those. There’s no reason to try to bunt at a ball. According to Brooks Baseball, Alvarez faced 60 pitches away off the plate, and he swung at 40 of them. He swung at 12 of 29 pitches in the zone, over the middle third. Alvarez this year exhibited anti-discipline. That’s inconceivable to me, but it happened.

What are some representative Alvarez plate appearances? We can go back to April, when he batted twice in a game against the Nationals. Plate appearance the first:

Plate appearance the second:

Here’s how that second one ended up:

Henderson Alvarez struck out, then reached, then was called out on batter interference. It’s not quite Hunter Pence hitting the baseball three times with one swing, but this was one of the weirder individual plays all year long, and it’s fitting it happened at the beginning of one of the weirder batting seasons on record. No matter how you choose to analyze him, whether as a hitter or as a pitcher, Henderson Alvarez has a lot of weird going on.

What is Alvarez as a hitter? This season, he tied for fourth in strikeouts on missed or foul bunts, with four. That’s bad, and the discipline also suggests bad, but then Alvarez batted .193, which is good enough for a pitcher. Last season, by some miracle, Alvarez batted .300 and slugged .500, and the man has a swing that isn’t embarrassing:

Alvarez hit a home run there, against the Cubs in 2013, and here are a couple quotes:

“As soon as I hit it, I knew it was gone,” Alvarez said through translator and Marlins third-base coach Joe Espada. “I was up there looking for a good pitch I could hit and I got it and put it in play.”

…

“It was a cutter, [Wood] was trying to back-door a cutter and pulled it across the middle of the plate,” said Cubs manager Dale Sveum. “That guy can swing the bat as good as any pitcher in the game.”

“That guy can swing the bat as good as any pitcher in the game.” For all I know, that’s not incorrect. Alvarez does have a good swing and he hit that ball against the Cubs nearly 104 miles per hour, which is substantial. The issue is that hitting has two parts — you need to have a good swing, and you need to know when and where to apply it. Used to be Mariners fans would hear every month about Greg Dobbs‘ picture-perfect swing mechanics. Apparently he played baseball this season, but he’s 36 years old, and he’s sitting on a career wRC+ that isn’t much higher than double that.

It’s not simply that Alvarez likes his swing so much he uses it all the time. If that were the case, he’d have a much higher Z-Swing%. He’s somehow simultaneously over-aggressive and over-patient, or at least he was this season, and this season’s numbers aren’t getting updated anymore. Alvarez officially did something no one has done. Ultimately, it wasn’t that bad for the Marlins — Alvarez as a hitter was worth 0.2 WAR. Ultimately, he didn’t under-perform a coin — a coin wouldn’t have hit 11 singles. But a coin, at least, would’ve had a better process. Alvarez’s ends justify the means, but the means just don’t make any sense.