THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I think your idea that guys who can’t drive the ball should be more selective is thought-provoking for me as a coach.

Certainly Brett Gardner is a shining example of success with that model.  Luis Castillo a few years back.

At the high school level, it’s interesting to coach the kids who lack extra-base pop. On one hand, a walk is practically the equivalent of their best-case scenario, a single.  This would figure to lend itself to the ultra-picky Brett Gardner approach.

But high school umpires in general are desirous to help pitchers.  They don’t want kids up there looking for a walk, and the umps get paid by the game - not by the hour.  So it’s not uncommon for a kid to get rung up on a pitch that was - for him - unhittable.

When I weigh those pros and cons, I find that they cancel each other out enough that I don’t want to strongly emphasize a team wide approach one way or the other at the plate, patient vs. aggressive. If one was definitively better I’d embrace it team-wide.

@JJ

For the reason you mentioned combined with “high school defense skill”, having average or below hitters jump all over the 1st good pitch they see might be a good strategy at that level. The inconsistency from home plate umps is frustrating.

It’s been my experience that when you tell average/below hitters to “jump all over the first pitch they see” they hear “If you can reach it, swing!”.

Hitters have individual tendencies, preferences, and styles. For some batters if you try to get them to se emore pitches they simply lose an aggressive edge that contributed to them being effective, for others it can make them indecisive so when they do get a good pitch they just miss it or are late. For other it can be a game-changer. In one season we had a leadoff batter that in 34 games had something like 46 walks and 24 hits.

With our kids (10yo), we use visual we have our strike zone with “No Strikes” (very small box), a strike zone with 1-strike (a little bigger box), and then our 2-strike zone (you better cover 3 inches off the plate in all directions, which can be VERY frustrating for hitters with good discipline.

It works out great for us. If pitchers groove pitches looking to get ahead, we tee off on him early. If he tries to nibble the corners, then we often work the count and he struggles. We work on this continually in the-offseason. We start by just rewarding kids for swinging at a pitch we should. If the first pitch is on the corner but they don’t swing, we praise them for a “good take”. Then we focus on the best pitches to hit, then we work on hitting the ball well. Doesn’t make sense to work like crazy on mechanics and hitting the ball hard if they’re going to swing at pitches that aren’t conducive to solid contact.

At the high school level, the trend seems to be to not swing at anything that isn’t a fastball cockshot until you have 2-strikes, with the idea that virtually no HS pitcher can throw FBs on the corner or command their off-speed for an entire at bat. It’s amazing how well it works.

I can’t imagine in high school that pitchers can locate the strike zone.  What is the percent of pitches that are strikes on a 3-0 count in high school?

I struggle with the idea, expressed by LaRussa here and elsewhere, that hitters should change their approach in RBI situations.  Seems to me expanding one’s strike zone by a lot would be counter-productive, and expanding it by a little would be very difficult.

3/tango

i might also consider their first pitch strike percentage. i know when i pitched we saw a huge emphasis on first pitch strikes. i suspect high school pitchers are rattled a lot easier than pros (i know i was) and going 3-0 will shake their confidence and control.

I love that idea Tom. The ace relievers should always be used at the right time. I love how you point out that LaRussa himself understands that philosophy but he’s not putting it together.. LaRussa himself!!

I long for the days when we’d see the ace reliever show up in the 7th inning to put out a fire, instead of showing up in the 9th for fire prevention.

I remembr watching the Yankees a lot in ‘83 and it seemed like Gossage was always coming in from the ‘pen in the 7th or 8th inning.

"The only thing I know is that every hitter is different, and he should hit in his own optimal manner.”

Right!  Painting hitting or pitching with such a broad stroke is worthless.

At the same time, if you know a hitter or pitcher and you think that you can give him some “approach” suggestions to improve his batting or pitching, then all the more power to you.  That is part of what makes a good manager or coach, right?

“I struggle with the idea, expressed by LaRussa here and elsewhere, that hitters should change their approach in RBI situations.  Seems to me expanding one’s strike zone by a lot would be counter-productive, and expanding it by a little would be very difficult.”

Pierre, hitters and pitches should and do change their approach in every situation.  That is because the values (weights) of the offensive components (walks, K’s, HR, etc.) change with the situation and thus you want to tailor your approach to get more of those components that are worth more in that specific situation. 

For example, in an “RBI situation” typically a walk is worth less than a hit (relative to other situation or the average situation) so you want to change your approach to walk less and get more hits.

Etc.

Along these lines, I thought Craig Wright had a great insight last year when he wondered if the pendulum had swung too far in terms of batters taking pitches.  He showed the data for P/PA over the last 20 years, and hypothesized that one reason (or the primary reason) for newer pitcher dominance is because batters had gone too far and become too passive at the plate.

The statistician’s viewpoint of this is pretty obvious; if your expected results for swinging at that pitch (and putting it in play) are better than your expected results on or after an 0-1 count (or whatever count you expect to face by not swinging), you should swing.

And it’s probably true that non-power high-contact hitters have worse expected results swinging at most first pitches, and higher expected results with an X-2 count than low-contact hitters, which would mean they should swing less at the first pitch.

I certainly agree with LaRussa when he says “you’d better be READY to swing early”; if you’re guaranteeing a non-swing on the first pitch, you’re not hitting optimally no matter who you are. (Unless maybe you’re a pitcher yourself and you’re just hoping for a bad walk.)

"if you’re guaranteeing a non-swing on the first pitch”

The premise itself doesn’t exist.  We don’t need to discuss it at all.

Ok, but if so, then LaRussa made a pretty meaningless statement by saying you’d better be READY to swing. If all MLB batters are ready to swing in that spot…

#7/MGL- I understand why in theory you would sacrifice walks for hits in RBI situations.  I’m just skeptical about the ability of MLB hitters to succesfully adjust/optimize in this way. I’m sure this has been analyzed, but I would need to be convinced that this is something I should be trying as a hitter or advocating as a coach. 

Different teams seem to have different philosophies about this, too.  David Ortiz has a story about when he first came to Boston and made a “productive out” the way he’d been taught in Minnesota, and the Boston coaches were like “what the f*** are you doing?”.

@Tango #3 and #5:  I wish I knew.  I plan to chart it for our teams this upcoming season, but even then we only have a sample of 27 games and one team.

In HS I think an uncomfortably high amount of decisions have to be made solely on “gut"/feel/scouting, etc.  (example:  You don’t have enough at-bats to accurately rank 1-9 the true talent level of your hitters).

I wish I had better data. If I could afford to, I would hire a bunch of stringers to collect data for every game played in our league this year.

@13

have some of the players do it? i know when i played i had a coach who had benched players (and everyone took some time on the bench) keep track of pitch counts and keep a book. i dont think he ever did too much with the data though. im pretty sure he just used it as a tool to help keep the bench players focused on the game and feeling involved.

wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to keep a few bench players involved with that.  especially if you could demonstrate the potential value to them. though it is dependent some on the attitudes of the kids of course.

I kept an incredible amount of pitching data for our pitchers on my own created pitching chart. Pitch types, sequences, location (estimated by where our C setup and how he had to move the glove, hit type (G, L, F and direction), result.

The problems are:

[1] You never get enough of a sample.
[2] You only play a single team at most 4 times in a season.

So, I never really put too much emphasis on what opponents have done, but rather look at their stance/mechanics/approach and combined that with what I felt our pitcher(s) did best.

We occasionally used the data for defensive positioning, but even then that aspect was mostly based on the velocity of our pitcher at the time.

In HS, you can have an incredible amount of success with changeups in fastball counts, provided the pitcher has some reasonable control. At that level even a hanging changeup most often results in a long, long, long foul ball. We would get a chuckle sometimes on a hitter sitting dead red on 2-0 and come out of his shoes on a changeup, and then get busted inside with a fastball on the next pitch. I’m also a fan of consecutive changeups. I explain to our pitchers that if you always follow a change with a fastball, then when you throw a change, you’re telling the batter what the next pitch is. So, against really good hitters, back-to-back changeups can be really effective because they’re thinking “He just through a change, here comes a fastball”.

I’m a HUGE fan of the cutter/change combo in JH/HS. The cutter particularly gives pitchers more confidence to “pitch inside”, knowing the the pitch is going to run back towards the plate (and stay in the area where the metal bat has it’s weakness).

What I used our limited data for primarily was to show our pitchers how their effectiveness changed based on count. Basically, they had to get ahead ... except for our kid that threw low 90s. He could pretty much do whatever wanted, whenever he wanted ... and did. I had a lot of fun with a 86-88mph 6’2 lefty with great control and command of a change, curve, and newly learned cutter. He quickly lerned that RHBs REALLY do not like hard cutters in on the hands, but they can’t resist swinging because it looks like a cockshot FB until it’s too late. That kid was fun. 13-0 with a microscopic ERA.

My buddy who coaches a powerhouse found himself without a true ace a few years ago. He applied a strategy I love. He used 3 pitchers every game. Each one pitched one time through the order. A medium velocity lefty, a sidearm righty, and then a hard throwing righty. 3 different looks, and none of them ever went more than 1.5 times through the lineup. I use this same setup for travel baseball and all-star tourneys. It works very well.

In his statement, LaRussa reveals (and revels in) his bias. He focuses on the negative aspect of the most patient batters--that they (presumably) take too many good pitches to hit, especially in RBI situations. He chooses to ignore the the negative aspects of aggressive batters--swinging at bad pitches and lessening their likelihood of getting a hit, and the lack of BB production.

It may be unfair to couple his statements with Chipper’s, which IIRC were only about swinging at a good-to-hit first pitch from a good pitcher.

Very unimpressive thought process from TLR. No wonder MGL and him didn’t hit it off…

dave/#16- I agree.  He implies that guys are up there trying to work the count and wangle a walk.  They’re not.  They’re trying to get a good pitch to hit.