If Dan Farnsworth could set up a website where you might pay to sit next to him during a game, I would recommend that website. If you like any of the hitting interviews I’ve done recently, you’ll understand what it can mean to a person just to pick his brain.

Tthere are times when he just says something small after an at-bat, and off go three FanGraphers with their databases and their queries and their coding languages. Seriously, it took me, Jeff Zimmerman, Jonah Pemstein, and a few attempts to even get a first answer to this sort-of question from Mr. Farnsworth.

“I wish teams wouldn’t teach their batters to swing to protect the runner. They don’t do that anymore I hope, it has to be easy to disprove as a good strategy” is roughly what he said. “DO THEY?” is what I wondered. “IS IT?”

The title gives it away, but it’s not a good strategy. With a sample size over 600 in both cases, here are the stolen base success rates when a batter swings and when he doesn’t.

Batter swings: 76.87%
Batter doesn’t swing: 78.66%

Normally we don’t drill down that deep. Normally we’d show those numbers as 77% and 79% respectively, but it’s really closer than that, so two decimal points we’ve got. Doesn’t look like a good idea to swing to protect the runner.

If the success rate numbers both look high, it’s because we used plays designated stolen bases by Gameday and sometimes the totals don’t match up to the official scoring. And we’ve excluded all pitch-outs and pick-offs, which do a decent job of catching would-be baserunners, it looks like, since the overall success rate was 72.8% last year.

Here’s the thing that’s a little less exciting, though. It doesn’t look like we can play the gotcha game with major league teams. It looks like the swing rate on actual, real-life, non-pitch-out pitches last year was 17.3% when the runner took off for second. Put that next to a 46.7% swing rate over all of baseball last year, and you’ll see that teams are, at the very least, not telling their batters *to* swing when they see the runner take off. We even have Todd Frazier saying he doesn’t swing when he sees the batter take off, because it’s distracting.

So, if you see a feeble swing when the runner’s going, it’s fair to assume that one of three (perhaps less exciting) things just happened. 1) The pitch looked like a meatball to the batter, and he was fooled; 2) The player acted on an old habit coached into him early in his playing career; or 3) The hit-and-run was on, and he missed.