Scutaro’s Caught Lookings
After an impressive 2009 season in which Marco Scutaro held a .354 wOBA, he’s back to a modest .317, almost a perfect match for his career average. In other words: Scutaro is back to being Scutaro. Digging around his Baseball-Reference page leads me to ask this question: would you suspect that Scutaro strikes out more often looking or swinging?
I knew Scutaro is among the game’s premiere in-zone contact hitters. This year he’s at 97.3% and at 94.3% for his career, which suggests that Scutaro is unlikely to swing and miss often, but it can happen. As it turns out, though, Scutaro isn’t swinging and missing a lot for strike three at all. He actually leads the league in strikeouts looking (divided by total strikeouts) among batters with 300+ plate appearances. Not only that, but Scutaro is at 64% (he’s one of three players over 50% and the only one above 55%), which happens to be four standard deviations from the mean (24%).
The 64% figure would only be the second highest rate of Scutaro’s career, with 2007’s 65% finishing in first; in between, Scutaro posted rates of 51% and 60%. Suffice to say that Scutaro enjoys watching, which is probably not one of his endearing qualities. I wanted to see just what Scutaro is looking at and as such took his pitchfx data this season and plotted it like such:
I’m no Dave Allen, but I did add a little Paint to the image with those four lines. The points are not arbitrary, as the black lines indicate the edges of the plate and the red lines represent the half inch points. Anything that falls within the red is over the middle while anything outside the black is off the plate. Your eyes do not lie as most of Scutaro’s strike threes take place on the outside corner.
It seems to me those spots are going to make it hard for any batter to put a good swing on the pitch. As Scutaro seems to understand his own limitations at making contact, perhaps the high density of taken strikes is admittance that some of these pitches were simply placed in an unhittable position in the zone, even for the guy who hits everything in the zone.
Half inch points? Don’t you mean six inch? Or half foot?
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“Your eyes do not lie as most of Scutaro’s strike threes take place on the outside corner.”
Wouldn’t that be the inside corner on a righty?
No. The Graph is from a catcher’s point of view, so righties are on the left side.
Not sure if it’s adding to it, but Scutaro has had a lingering injury in his (I believe) left pectoral muscle. With that kind of nagging injury, he’d be even more unlikely to swing, and succeed, down and away.
This is all speculation, but swinging at any pitch in that area for a right handed hitter tends to lead to a ground ball out. Could it be that some of those strike threes were willingly taken to stay away from a double play?
I’ve looked at Scutaro before and i love his approach. I would like to see the 2-strike balls he has had called and I bet you that a lot of them will overlap with those outside corner strike 3s.
I think he’s playing percentages… he knows that he is unlikely to be very productive on a pitch like that and he’s willing to leave it up to the ump to call him out rather than to swing and remove all doubt. I’m guessing that this helps him get a lot of better pitches to hit as well and helps him worth the count for more 2-strike walks.
I wonder if a higher percentage of the borderline pitches went his way last year, that would be interesting to see as well.
An interesting article until the conclusion – perhaps it’s recognition that the pitches are unhittable… this is a guy who’s contact rate in the zone is 97.3% and the pitches are unhittable?
Here’s a different question – is his contact rate so high because he primarily swings at “fat” pitches and takes the ones on the corner or just that he doesn’t swing at them with 2 strikes? It might be interesting to looked at called strikes ve pitches swung at in non 2 strike counts
The Sox have tended to load their lineup with guys who are extremely selective (Youk, Drew), mistake hitters (Lowell) or both (Ortiz); Scutaro fits that mold. It’s interesting that they signed him at the same time that they were diversifying by adding free swingers (Beltre, Cameron).
I don’t know the exact number but have watched all the Phillies games this year and noticed Jayson Werth is get called out looking alot more than I can remember.