Hitters that regularly chase pitches outside of the strike zone

Adam Jones is a free swinger at the plate. In stints with the Mariners and Orioles, Jones holds a lowly 4.5 BB% while chasing 41.2% of pitches outside of the strike zone. He regularly commits to pitches that are either too far up, down, left, or right of home plate. The 30-year old Orioles outfielder, however, consistently produces at the plate, posting a 107 RC+ and an overall .277/.318 /.462 slash during his career and has hit at least 25 home runs since 2011.

For Jones, swinging at the first or second pitch is built into his hitting approach. In 2016, he took merely 3.48 pitches per plate appearance (14th lowest in baseball) comparable to other hackers including Andrelton Simmons, Salvador Perez, and teammate Jonathan Schoop. [1] For reference, the percent of pitches that a hitter swings outside of the strike zone is called O-Swing%.

By contrast, Dexter Fowler’s plate approach tells a different story. The Georgian native averaged 4.08 pitches per plate appearance (20th overall) while posting a 9.4 O-Swing%. For comparison Jones chased a respective 31% and 26% of pitches that were extremely far right and left of the strike zone. The more disciplined Fowler committed to just 9% and 2% of these pitches last season.

Regressing O-Swing% to the league average

From a hitter’s home run rate to value of the Euro, outliers tend to regress towards the established baseline average. To test this idea with O-Swing%, we collected a subset of 23 players with among the highest O-Swing% dating back to 2014 and compared this value to their O-Swing% over 2015 and 2016. To quality, the hitters were required to record at least 150 plate appearances per season over the 2014 to 2016 timeframe.

Figure 1: Relationship between O-Swing% and Contact rate (correlation is -0.13) between 2014 to 2016 for hitters with at least 300 plate appearances per season.

This player sample averaged a very high 40.2 O-Swing% in 2014. The MLB league average O-Swing% hovers around 30%. Compared to 2015, however, these players swung at 38.5% of pitches outside of the strike zone corresponding to a -1.6% drop between 2014 and 2015. Similarly, in 2016, the groups’ O-Swing% fell even further to 37.7% between 2015 and 2016 suggesting that O-Swing% regresses ever so slightly to the mean.

Figure 2: Hitters that posted the highest O-Swing% in 2016 (minimum 300 plate appearances).

Parching through the data, we found that 23 of the 24 hitters decreased their O-Swing% from 2014 through 2016. With a +3.9 O-Swing% spike from 40.9% (2014) to 44.8% (2016), the aforementioned Jones was the lone player in the sample to increase his chase rate. To be fair, he did reduce his O-Swing% last season by 1.7% compared to 2015.

On the other hand, Mike Zunino, Juan Uribe, and Evan Gattis made the biggest gains to their plate discipline. Between 2014 and 2016 the trio reduced their O-Swing% by -8.77 points. While Uribe and Gattis chased a slightly above average amount of pitches outside of the zone last season, Zunino’s 29.6 O-Swing% was better than the MLB average. In fact, the Mariners catcher was the lone player in the sample to cut his O-Swing% under this threshold.

We next looked at the individual seasons of hitters with above and below the 30% O-Swing% mark over 2014 and 2016.[2] Somewhat unsurprisingly, the less disciplined hitters swung at 50.2% of all pitches compared to 43.4% of the more selective hitters. The latter made contract more frequently outside of the strike zone, a +1% bump, and had an overall edge in contact (+1.3%) in relation to the former group. They also swung at just 8.8% of pitches in the strike zone compared to 10.8% rate of the less disciplined hitters.

Yet, although chasing pitches outside of the strike zone tends to depress walk percentage and wOBA, it has no effect on playing time from a plate appearance standpoint. Between 2014 and 2016, hitters that posted an O-Swing% (above 30.5%) recorded 17 more plate appearances on average than more selective hitters.[3] While less disciplined group (those above the 30 O-Swing% mark) walked 3.5% less than their counterparts, both groups struck out at slightly above 20% of all plate appearances.

Back in Baltimore, there may be some silver lining in Jones’ free swinging tendencies. For starters, he swung at 1.7% less pitches outside of the strike zone last season than in 2015. For the first time six seasons, he also nudged his walk percentage above 5% up from 4.1% a year earlier. Unlike other less talented hitters that chase bad pitches and post low walk rates, Jones has shown that sometimes it is advantageous to swing earlier in the count instead of focusing on pitch counts and on base percentage. Sometimes it is as simple as to follow the motto used by some MLB hitters “see ball, hit ball”.

Sources:

http://www.espn.com/mlb/stats/batting/_/sort/pitchesPerPlateAppearance/qualified/false/type/expanded/order/false/minpa/300

http://www.fangraphs.com/

[1] Players with at least 300 plate appearances in 2016

[2] We looked at 1,178 individual player seasons between 2014 and 2016

[3] Once again, for our purposes the “more selective hitters” have a O-Swing% below 30%.

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