As I understand it, one aspect of the modern view of baseball is that batters should be trying to tire out pitchers by forcing them to run up their pitch count. If so, it seems that a simple & useful statistic for batters would be the number of pitches they face divided by the number of outs they make.
Googling doesn’t produce much - perhaps there’s something wrong with this idea.
Has this been considered? Does anyone track this stat? Is it useful? Might it be?
Yeah, the stat is tracked by Elias and Stats Inc. In your standard box score you can easily calculate it for the pitcher/team by dividing the pitchers pitch count and the number of batters faced. You will often hear this quoted by analysts and commentators, but it’s generally not available to the public free of charge. Non-standard stats like this are a for-profit enterprise for the companies that do this sort of thing.
I believe this is one of the stats that the Moneyball and Sabermetrics guys look at when evaluating a player and I think it is a pretty important asset for a hitter to have. I endlessly bitch about the Cubs penchant for having players who refuse to work a pitch count. I mean the current way of doing things has only failed for a century now.
Yeah, but NEXT year they’ll catch on. …
[sub]Yes, I’m kidding. The Cubs are hopeless.[/sub]
The late Ted Williams taught that a hitter who wallops an early pitch learns nothing about a pitcher in terms of how he sets up his best pitch, etc. Baseball folks speak well of a “patient hitter,” one who is willing to take a walk rather than dive after a bad pitch. A hitter who is skilled at fouling off unfriendly pitches can eventually get the pitch he wants.
Many managers will pull a pitcher after 106 pitches or so, offering an advantage to a team with patient hitters. If they can bring on that 106 count early, they can try their luck with the bullpen pitchers, who may not be as good as the starter.
Some pitchers can induce grounders or popups, and that makes for a low pitch count. Orel Hirscheiser told George Will that his idea of a perfect game is one pitch per batter, 27, with his team-mates making the outs on the poor hits.
ETA: My opinions here are those of an armchair manager, and they carry the weight you’d expect from such a guy. :dubious:
What I don’t get is why they don’t consider warm up pitches bewteen innings in with the pitch counts- they are still throwing the ball, after all, regardless if a batter is there or not, albeit maybe a few mph slower perhaps.
Just because the don’t count them in the stats doesn’t mean that a manager doesn’t consider them. Every pitcher throws them, the same number before each inning, so really, there’s little point in adding them into the box score. You can always just assume that a pitcher in the game threw 8 pitches per inning warming up. Since the number is constant, adding them into the overall pitch count provides almost no extra comparative value. Plus the fact that they occur outside of actual gameplay gives them almost zero value to statisticians.
Managers take into account all warm up pitches, those on the mound and those in the bullpen, when evaluating their pitchers fitness to play.
On the other hand, a batter who has a reputation for being “patient” will be facing a lot of 0-1 counts and may never see a pitch as good as the first one thrown, so there is a downside to patience.
I never understood why the pitcher is supposed to throw a ball way of the strike zone on a 0-2 count. To the point that some managers fine a pitcher who gives up a hit on an 0-2 count. It seems obvious that the best strategy is to nibble and, every once in a while, the player will hit it safely, especially if the nibble turns into a big bite. Still, it cannot be the best strategy to just thrown it away (unless you are pitching to Vlad Guererro in which case you give up an HR on anything almost.
I remember that Wade Boggs rarely swung at the first pitch. This obviously worked for him - he was a great hitter, and would use the first pitch to help time the rest of the pitches for the at-bat. I never could figure out, though, why opposing pitchers didn’t catch on to this and start him off with a change-up or other off-speed pitch. You could get an easy strike without Boggs either getting a hit (because he wouldn’t swing) or timing your fastball.
I believe patience is a good thing in a hitter, but it’s also bad to be too predictable. Even a patient hitter should swing at the first pitch sometimes (especially if it’s a fat one) just to keep the pitchers honest.
The business of never throwing a strike on an 0-2 count makes me nuts. Some pitchers are so scared of giving up a hit at 0-2 that they’ll throw the pitch several inches outside. Being at 0-2 gives the pitcher a huge advantage - the hitter has to swing at any strike - and by wasting a pitch a pitcher is not only throwing part of his advantage away, he’s also running up his pitch count. In most cases a pitcher would be better off to try to make the batter swing at his “out pitch,” whether it be a high inside fastball, a curveball, a backdoor slider or a splitter. Make the batter swing at your best pitch - don’t let the batter off the hook even a little bit.
Generally I agree with this, but I think it can be a bit more complicated than that. Certainly there are going to be occasions where the first pitch is a very hittable one, but getting the best pitch to hit isn’t always the only priority. There are situations where a pitcher may be struggling with his control or tiring badly and while you may slightly diminish your odds of getting a hit in that at bat by taking a hittable first pitch, you might improve your odds of your team winning the game. Lose a battle but win the war, if you will.
Additionally, all this is secondary to having a good scouting report. Certain pitchers have tendencies on the first pitch, and there are situations where you know the first pitch will be a hittable one. All things being equal you should do your best to work the count, and a hitter should choose the ideal moment when to be extra aggressive early in the count. They shouldn’t just do it at random.
Too many hitters just go up there and play by “feel” and in big spots that translates to being hyper-aggressive when the pressure is on.
In last nights game (a.k.a. Joe Torre’s Last Stand), during one of Bobby Abreu’s at bats, the announcers started talking about how patient he was. One of them said that he lead the AL in 4.3 pitches per out.
So, somebody is keeping track of such things.
Julio Franco is another player well known for taking the first pitch and fouling off a lot of pitches in order to get the one he wants.
Here is a post from Hardball Times related to this topic.
http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/and-heres-the-pitch/
The upshot is that you can use this data to get a profile for a particular player and perhaps tell if they are changing their approach (intentionally or unintentionally) but that it doesn’t really track with overall player quality that well.
Even the most patient hitters will swing at the first pitch - if it’s the right pitch.
It’s simplistic, and actually inaccurate, to look at a Ted Williams or a Wade Boggs and say they’re taking pitches to see what the pitcher’s got or “Time his fastball” or some such thing.
Most good hitters like Wade Boggs are simply acting in accordance with the fact that not all strikes are good pitches to hit, and in the major leagues a LOT of strikes are bad pitches to hit. A batter who attempts to hit all strikes will likely end up hitting into a lot of outs, because he’ll be hitting unadvisable pitches - pulling sliders right to the shortstop on the ground, popping up fastballs on the inner half, stuff like that. Some pitches simply cannot be easily hit for base hits, even if they’re strikes. The ideal strategy is not just to hit A pitch, but to hit THE most hittable pitch. A good hitter with no strikes on him will therefore try to limit himself to swinging only a pitch of his choosing - letting the low and away breaking ball and the tight fastball by, but hammering the pitch up and away, if that’s his strength. With one strike, this area of choice becomes wider; you must be willing to swing at a greater range of pitches. With two strikes, the area of choice is wider still; now you have to take a cut at almost anything that’s a strike. The area of choice is also dependent upon the number of balls in the count. 0-2, you swing at anything that might be close because it’s just not very likely that you will work it back to 3 and 2, so risking a called third strike isn’t worth it. But 3 and 2, you might take a borderline pitch if it’s not in your hitting zone because the reward for getting one more pitch called a ball is so much higher.
It’s not that good hitters won’t swing at the first pitch, it’s just that it doesn’t make any sense to unless it’s the ideal pitch to hit. You’re just not going to get that many REALLY hittable pitches in the big leagues, and the more pitches you see, the likelier it is you will see that hittable pitch.
If what you’re saying were true in Boggs’ case, he would have swung at the first pitch at least some of the time. He didn’t. He took the first pitch so consistently that people commented on it constantly. He wasn’t simply being selective. Other selective hitters - say Frank Thomas - will swing at a really hittable first pitch. Boggs rarely did this.
Here is an excerpt from a conversation between Wade Boggs, Ted Williams and Don Mattingly in which Williams counsels Boggs to swing at first pitch fastballs:
So Williams, at least, thought Boggs wasn’t being aggressive enough on the first pitch. Williams was one of the most patient hitters ever. He preached patience as a big part of his hitting philosophy. It really says something if even he thought Boggs wasn’t swinging at the first pitch often enough.
You can find the conversation here .