Plate Discipline Stats
About two years ago I attempted to delve further into plate discipline with two articles: Dissecting Plate Discipline Part 1, Part 2.
And then a year later I took an additional look at plate discipline: More on Plate Discipline
All batters now have plate discipline stats available dating back to 2005. Here’s what they are:
- O-Swing%: The percentage of pitches a batter swings at outside the strike zone.
- Z-Swing%: The percentage of pitches a batter swings at inside the strike zone.
- Swing%: The overall percentage of pitches a batter swings at.
- O-Contact%: The percentage of pitches a batter makes contact with outside the strike zone when swinging the bat.
- Z-Contact%: The percentage of pitches a batter makes contact with inside the strike zone when swinging the bat.
- Contact%: The overall percentage of a batter makes contact with when swinging the bat.
- Zone%: The overall percentage of pitches a batter sees inside the strike zone.
What you’ll want to know is the major league averages for each stat:
Season O-Swing Z-Swing Swing O-Contact Z-Contact Contact Zone 2005 20.3% 68.0% 46.0% 51.8% 88.3% 80.8% 53.8% 2006 23.5% 66.6% 46.1% 57.4% 88.5% 81.0% 52.6% 2007 25.0% 66.6% 45.9% 60.8% 88.2% 80.8% 50.3%
All the location data is from Baseball Info Solutions and you can find all these stats in the player pages at the very bottom: Vladimir Guerrero
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David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.
wow. this site keeps getting better and better. thanks!
You might want to add league averages for each category on the player pages, or at least make a show/hide toggle for them. That would be much easier than finding this post every time someone looks at these numbers, especially for someone who didn’t see this post.
Dan, good idea. The other option would be to make them all above/below average stats, not entirely sure how I feel about that though…
Man, I *heart* fangraphs.
Just when I thought fangraphs couldn’t get any better……we’re not worthy
Awesome. Any chance we’ll get to see any more analysis with TLV data?
this is awesome thanks so much with your help last year i dominated fb and now I am already doing it again this can only help!!
Absolutely, Sky. We’ll be doing a lot more TLV analysis as the year goes on.
Why is O-Contact% consistently rising? Random or real?
Is the Zone% data accurate for the Los Angeles teams? It is suspicious to me that for the last 2 seasons, all of the qualified hitters from the Dodgers and Angels have the lowest Zone% in the league. This can’t be right, can it?
We’re looking into the LA teams situation. It does seem a little weird.
this is really good stuff. is there any way we can break this down into where it is in the pitch count. the 0-2 data would be really interesting.
all right, nevermind. i now know what TLV is. (newbie)
Could you add the columns for production (even just BA) for O-swing” and “Z-swing”?
I’m going to look into this today since average stats for the plate discipline stats have been highly requested.
Hey David, I have a very minor suggestion. I was looking at these definitions:
# O-Swing%: The percentage of pitches a batter swings at outside the strike zone.
# Z-Swing%: The percentage of pitches a batter swings at inside the strike zone.
…and I didn’t understand why these two figures didn’t add up to 1. The wording makes it seem as though the denominator of both stats is swings. When you add these definitions to the glossary (hint, hint), I’d suggest something like:
Percent of pitches outside the strike zone that a batter swings at.
Thanks.
If you are a pitcher, do you want z-strike% to be high or low?
I meant Z-Swing%
Well the only way pitches in the zone are bad is if they turn into hits… so if the batter doesn’t swing at a pitch in the zone its good for the pitcher.
I believe you would want it be low which would mean that batters often take your pitches thinking they are going to be out of the zone and they are not (perhaps especially true of breaking balls).
Is there an equivalent statistic for a pitcher? it would show a pitchers ability (or inability) to get batters to chase bad pitches.