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A Look at Rays Batter’s Pitch Result – Through 40 Games
Rainbow Warriors May 22nd. 2010, 4:50pmFor the most part, anytime a player is at the plate there are five different outcomes of a pitch. These are ball, called strike, foul, in play, or a swinging strike. Pitch F/x does a marvelous job of tracking this and I prefer to use the database that Joe Lefkowitz has built at his website. For your viewing pleasure, I have compiled the percentages of each outcome for each batter on our team. These can be seen below (CLICK ON IMAGE FOR A LARGER VERSION):
Some of the things that jump out to me are:
- B.J. Upton’s swinging strikes placing second on the team, while his called strikes are below the average. The common perception is that B.J. takes a lot of strikes, but this seems to indicate that he’s getting himself in more trouble with the swing-and-miss.
- Gabe Kapler and Reid Brignac’s ability to foul off (spoil) good pitches is evident here. They keep at bats going by having high foul rates which is better than getting a strike.
- You could probably assign the “hacker” label to Carl Crawford, Dioner Navarro, Jason Bartlett, and Willy Aybar due to their high “in play” percentages. There are far worse things than putting the ball in play so kudos to these guys.
There is certainly more information to glean from this, but I will leave that up to the reader to form your own opinions. If you feel strongly about something, please bring it to everyone’s attention in the comments.
I also want to take a look at how often guys swing or don’t swing. You can see that in the below chart (CLICK ON IMAGE FOR A LARGER VERSION):
The obvious stuff here is how many pitches that Sean Rodriguez gives a nice gander at. He’s taking a ton of pitches so far which is a good thing in my mind as it means he’s being selective, nice to see that out of the young man. He’s not the only one though as John Jaso has taken an even higher percentage and Jason Bartlett is in the neighborhood as well. Not to be left out Ben Zobrist is also showing a ton of patience. The other side of the coin has new addition Hank Blalock not taking many pitches with Reid Brignac showing some hacker tendancies as well. B.J. Upton has shown a similar propensity to swing more than take. With all these guys it would be nice to see them get that no swing percentage up as it’s not likely that a pitcher is going to be giving you a good pitch to hit more than 50% of the time.
Next weekend I will show how the rest of the AL East breaks down for comparison purposes, but in the meantime, what do you think?
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This is awesome! Keep up the good work!
FYI you have to click the image to see the key, kinda confused at first glance. Not sure if you can fix that.
I found this very interesting when comparing Brignac and Rodriguez. The second chart shows that Brignac is more of a hacker than Sean is, but then if you look at the first chart you could argue that Reid is fouling a lot of pitches off to stay alive and Sean is looking at a lot of strikes. I guess what it comes down to is they both have very different approaches.
Also it would be interesting to take a closer look at Zobrist. Although the sample size is too small he is really starting to warm up now. I just wonder if he changed his strategy at all? There were times earlier in the year that he didn’t seem aggressive to me?
Sorry about that MJ, I just caught it myself. In the first chart green=Ball, red=Called Strike, yellow=Foul, blue=In Play, and black=Swinging Strikes.
In the second chart, green=No Swing and red=Swing.
RE: Kapler fouling balls off… In the perfecto, I felt his second to last at bat was the Rays best shot at breaking up the perfect game. He put together the best at bats against Braden, probably a testament to his experience.
The thing that stands out to me is Shoppach’s swing strike %. Nearly twice as much as Pena. This is admittedly a small sample size for Shop, but his career numbers indicate that he strikes out once in every three at bats. Not sure he will be much of an upgrade if the Navi’s head on a pike crowd gets their way when Shoppach is ready to return.
I would say, also, that the sample size for both Shoppach and Blaylock are small compared to the others, so we may discount those numbers — but if this is typical for Shoppach in other years, perhaps we will be longing for Navarro.
Actually 37% of total AB’s end in strikeouts.
http://tampabay.rays.mlb.com/team/player.jsp?player_id=431159
Right Rg. I should have mentioned that the Shopp and Blalock should have the smallest samples here and that’s a big reason I didn’t lump them into any of the “analysis” above. Sarah, I think the big thing to keep in mind is that Shopp absolutely murders lefties, but is the exact opposite against righties. Jaso should be able to fill that hole (assuming he can throw out more runners than Varitek and that doesn’t appear to be the case). With those two in a platoon I’m not sure what you do with Navi. He’s probably the best defensive catcher of the three, though his bat is nearly worthless. At the plate, both Jaso and Shopp are better vs. both types of pitcher than Navi. I’d probably start making a “Will Catch for Pie” sign if I were him.
How bout we use the DH for the catcher position and let the pitchers swing the bat? They can’t be much worse than Navi at the plate, we get Jaso or Shop’s bat in the lineup and utilize Navi’s D. It’s perfect! Ha.
[...] weekend Jason Hanselman at RaysIndex took a look at the Rays batters pitch results through the first 40 games. I found this very interesting as you can look at each player and see if your perception of what [...]