Making it Work with Lots of Whiffs
A couple weeks ago I looked at Chris Davis‘s contact struggles. In that post I displayed a histogram with all contact rates from 2003 to 2008 and Davis’s half season of 2009. Here is the same figure without Davis, but with Mark Reynolds’s 2008 contact rate indicated.
Not as much of an outlier as Davis, but last year Reynolds’s rate of 62.3% was the lowest of any regular since 2003. This year he is similarly lowest in the league with 63.4%. Reynolds, unlike Davis, makes it work. Even with this very very low contact rate Reynolds has a wOBA over .400, 12th best in the league.
One thing he has over Davis is much better plate discipline, swinging at only a quarter of pitches out of the zone compared to Davis’s 35.4%. As a result, and because pitchers don’t throw in the zone to him that much, he has a healthy walk rate of 11.8%.
In addition the pitches that Reynolds does make contact with are very likely to be HRs. Fly balls make up 46% of his balls in play and 28% of those are HRs. That means 12.9% of his balls in play are HRs (tops in the league with Adam Dunn second at 11.6%). As a result Reynolds is second in the league in HRs with 32.
Reynolds represents what Davis needs to be if he is going to succeed with a huge whiff rate. He needs to stop swinging at pitches out of the zone, and make sure the pitches he hits go a long way. Not rocket science, but it is helpful to see someone how makes it work with a big whiff rate.
Dave Allen's other baseball work can be found at Baseball Analysts.
First off, as a fantasy owner of Chris Davis, I hope he follows your advice and turns it around.
As you said, striking out at a high rate doesn’t necessarily mean that you will translate into a bad hitter with a low batting average. Another guy who is known for an extremely high strike out rate is Ryan Howard… and he is making it work.
I’m curious to see how Chris is going to bounce back. Looking at his minor league #’s there are a few different stories going on.
In the minors he has only struck out 26 times in 27 games compared to 114 K’s in 77 games in the bigs. On the flip side, he has only hit 4 home runs in 109 at bats.
If I had to guess, Chris took his demotion to heart and has tried to work on his overall game. Look for him to bounce back next year.
Chris Davis was just too much whiffs (and didn’t walk much, either).
He’s still not much of a walker, but from his re-call on, he posted a .308/.338/.496, and cut his K/PA down to 25.35% (sounds high, but is Ichiro-esque compared to the 41.16% he pulled for the first half of the year). Small sample size, but a contact focus looks like it’s helping Chris Davis, and it’s good he was able to learn and try to fix it at just 23.