THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I think it pays to look at in what count those extra swings and misses on pitches outside of the strikezone are on.  If they are coming in 1-0 or 2-1 counts or so, than they might actually be a good thing; however, if they are coming on 2 strike counts, they are of course a bad thing.  Even on the 1-0 counts, the loss in run expectancy for a strike may be worse than the loss in run expectancy for making contact with a ball.

Yeah, I kind of doubt that making contact can ever be worse than not.  And of course, you are much more likely to swing at OOZ pitches with 2 strikes, so I assume that most of these occurred (at least a plurality) with 2 K.

And these are small differences in contact rate. It could be random fluctuation and it could be that the out of zone pitches were REALLY out of zone.

Plus I don’t see how blaming his lack of success on playing in Chicago is mutually exclusive of whatever the physical reason was for the poor performance.

Even if the “pressure from the fans” caused his problems in Chicago, there has to be a physical reason, so I don’t get the “It wasn’t the fans, it was...” logic.

--"Yeah, I kind of doubt that making contact can ever be worse than not.”

I’m not so sure about that. I imagine that, with fewer than 2 strikes, it’s better to miss than to put an OOZ pitch into play. I’m talking about a generic hitter and a generic OOZ pitch, of course.

MGL/2, I’m not sure who did the editing on that piece, but they left out a few lines from my original that addressed some of your concerns.  For one, I had a line in there that swinging at an OOZ pitch might allow the batter to extend his arms and smack the ball a long way (but that it also will produce some weak dribblers).  I also pointed out that when Bradley was doing all of his swinging and missing, his K rate hit a career high.  I should have looked up his K-swing vs. K-called rates…

I will admit that it’s not the most in-depth piece (I had 45 minutes from commission of “something for ESPN” to submitting for publication) and checking out when the swing and misses on OOZs happened count-wise would be helpful, although, presumably, he had the same basic ideas in 2006, 2007, and 2009 with very different results.

It could just be random noise.  Then again, it’s a workable theory.