from Amazon
Tuesday, March 02, 2010
Batting eye and selectivity
"Hit” refers to contact not to a basehit (and it looks like the entire blog is dedicated to this, so go read all the entires).
Note here that this is the reason why I think the true measure of a batter’s eye is their Batting Eye on 2 strike counts. Before two strikes batters may choose to have a smaller zone of pitches where they are more productive which they want to swing at. Not swinging at borderline strikes may not really be a ‘miss’ in these cases – it may actually just be their higher level judgement at play.
A positive Selectivity rating means that you are more concerned with ‘false alarms’ than ‘misses.’ You are willing to not swing at some pitches which are in the strike zone – in order to wait for a pitch you can be more productive on. The higher it is the more you are trying to avoid swinging at bad pitches. On the other hand a negative rating means that you are biased in the other direction. You want to swing at the maximum number of good pitches without much regard for bad pitches.
Glove-slap Dan.