The Big Hurt.
I have always been fascinated by players who walk more than they strike out. There is a blend of strike zone judgment and the ability to connect when taking a swing that characterizes the skills of these players. They come in many forms, in recent years ranging from six foot five designated hitters like Frank Thomas to speedy, slap-hitting middle infielders such as Luis Castillo. There are three fundamental skills that help a player walk more often than strike out. Power, especially home run power, puts fear into pitchers and forces them to throw balls. Judgment of the strike zone allows batters to take ball four more often than strike three. And players with great skill at making contact when they do swing are even better at limiting their strikeouts.
Sluggers help their chances for high walk-to-strikeout ratios by engendering fear in pitchers and forcing them to throw pitches outside of the strike zone. At one time, great power hitters managed to swing for the fences without striking out very often. A pair of extreme examples were Lou Gehrig, who piled up 1508 career walks against 790 strikeouts, and Ted Williams, who had 2021 walks and only 709 strikeouts. For their careers, Gehrig and Williams struck out in less than 10 percent of their at bats while together hitting over 1000 home runs.
Continue reading ‘Ball Four Looking’
Ben Zobrist was once a light-hitting middle infielder. He bounced between the majors and the minors in 2006 and 2007, with poor results at the big league level. Then, halfway through 2008, at the age of 27, he displayed a stunning power surge that has not abated.
Ben Zobrist is about to put some serious hurt on a ball.
Throughout his time in the minors and in his first two stints with Tampa Bay, Zobrist had good discipline but hit few home runs. As Dave Cameron notes, this skill set does not often work well in the majors. Major league pitchers are more likely to use their superior control and are unafraid to challenge players that are not a threat to knock one out of the park. Prior to 2008, Zobrist certainly had not been a threat to knock one out, with 3 home runs in 280 major league at bats. Something changed that season. Zobrist hit 12 home runs in just 198 big league at bats in 2008, and he followed the performance with 27 in 501 at bats in 2009. How could this seemingly anomalous improvement have occurred? One in-depth article from early last season looked at how a swing doctor modified Zobrist’s approach and turned him from a singles slapper into a home run slugger.
Continue reading ‘The Power of Zobrist’
The last man to make batting average magic.
There is a magic to the number. It is nice and round, a multiple of 100, which itself may have a claim as the roundest of the round. It is a perfect square. And it is sufficiently high to seem unattainable. No player has had a batting average of 400 points—that’s 400 tenths of a percent, or, if you speak baseball, simply .400 with a silent decimal point—over the course of an entire season since Ted Williams did it at age 23 in 1941. Every year or two, someone carries an average in the .390s into July, and we spend the next couple of months discussing whether the magic number is in reach. They never make it.
In 1986, biologist Stephen Jay Gould published a seminal article about .400 hitting that explains its disappearance as the inevitable result of the maturation of baseball play. As the average performances for batter, pitcher, and fielder move closer to their natural upper limits, he argues, the highs and lows tighten around the mean. Standard deviation declines over time. In his words:
Continue reading ‘How to Hit .400′
Just watching another one go high and deep.
Mark McGwire belongs in the Hall of Fame. Here, I will look into a less obvious question: Was Mark McGwire the best right-handed power hitter in baseball history?
This question is not about his overall hitting skills. McGwire hit .263 for his career, putting him right around the historical average. He beat .300 over a full season only once, and he hit .231, .235 and .201 in consecutive years from 1989 to 1991. During his 15 years in the league he managed just 785 singles, about the number that Ichiro hits in a little over four seasons. He struck out. A lot. He whiffed in over a quarter of his at bats, piling up nearly as many K’s as hits over his career. His strikeout rate accelerated toward the end of his career, and in his last season, in 2001, he struck out more times than he reached base.
McGwire’s last season was remarkable in how it represented the extrapolation of his skills, taken to an absurd extreme. He came to the plate 364 times with this line: 118 strikeouts, 56 walks, 56 hits, and 29 home runs. He hit 29 homers but only four doubles that season, after hitting 32 homers with eight doubles the previous year (of course, no triples in either season—he hit only six his entire career, four of those in 1987, his rookie year). Even with a .187 batting average in 2001, he still got on base well over 30 percent of the time and managed an .808 OPS. FanGraphs actually marks him as a few runs above average with the bat that season.
Continue reading ‘The Case for McGwire’
Performance: enhanced. Awesomeness: all natural.
There is wide disagreement about how to put The Steroid Era into context. Unless opinions change drastically over the next few years, Mark McGwire will not get into the Hall of Fame. It is difficult to imagine voters letting in Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens, either. Meanwhile, Bonds’ home runs are “tainted,” and with Alex Rodriguez an admitted user, there appears to be no hope for “clean” records in the near future. But, though steroid use in sports has been well known and undisputed at least since the 1980s, baseball ignored it until the second half of this decade. Nobody knows for sure who used or what effects steroids had on their accomplishments. Nobody knows how far back steroid use goes. And players have been cheating in all kinds of other ways for 100 years. It is time to move on. It is time to accept that steroids happened, to accept that many, most, or all players were juiced, and to celebrate the accomplishments from The Steroid Era for what they were: great performances against the norms of the period, with no cherry-picking and no asterisks.
Continue reading ‘Steroids: It’s Time to Move On’
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