Alright, so I’ve been on a bit of a plate discipline kick recently, and the fact that the Mets shut me up a little by signing Jeff McNeil to a team-friendly four-year extension makes me think that it’s time to switch topics. So, allow me to bridge the gap between what I've been blabbering about for the past month to some future pitching posts by discussing something that might seem really mundane, but is really interesting.
Baseball analysis is trending in a direction where pitch optimization on the part of pitchers will become crucial. What I mean by that is dividing up the strike zone by ninths and seeing the quality of contact that hitters produce on a given pitch in a given location will become a commonplace way we judge pitchers. But, as most baseball stats go, that same rubric will be used for hitters. I get how some might see this as over-analyzing the game, but when players get to the major leagues, their abilities almost become robotic. It’s like how you can beat a chess grandmaster with the best strategy possible or no strategy at all, and nothing in between. Hitters and pitchers have to be textbook-level good in order to survive against each other.
Where I’m getting at is as follows. Earlier in the 2022 season, I was curious as to how the probability of a hitting outcome changes when the first pitch of a plate appearance is a ball versus a strike. A lot of this is out of a hitter’s control, but I was still interested in digging deeper. From FanGraphs, I downloaded the chart of every MLB hitter’s stats through a 1-0 count and an 0-1 count, and compared the differences, which were staggering. As much as I love batting average, it’s not important in this conversation because the scale of a good versus bad batting average doesn’t put into context how important the difference between being ahead or behind in the count is.
The average OPS of hitters who started their counts 1-0 in 2022 was about .810, or around the same as Trea Turner. The average OPS of hitters who started their counts 0-1 in 2022 was about .610, or around the same as Adam Frazier. That’s a 200-point difference, or the difference between about $20 million a year in free agency money.
We can learn a couple of things from this. First of all, having a good eye on the first pitch of a plate appearance is more important than I realized. Swing if it’s a strike (and make sure you can make contact) and don’t even think about swinging if it’s a ball. But let’s get deeper. You can make an argument that a pitcher’s putaway pitch that they use to strike out hitters should be utilized right out of the gate. That idea makes painting the corners of the strike zone with change-ups and tighter sliders on a first pitch much smarter in hindsight.
But what does this mean for the game moving forward? I’m no “good for the game” type of person, but why should anyone care about the difference between one single pitch to start a plate appearance? Very simply, it’s because that’s what baseball is all about. This is one of the smallest ways to see that value, in baseball, is aggregated. Rather than spend millions in free agency on big-named players, a team that struggled with OPS could’ve attacked the problem from this angle. JD Martinez’s .773 OPS when down 0-1, which is top 20 in the league, was probably a key reason why the Dodgers were so keen on signing him, even though he had a lackluster year overall. The same thing goes for Justin Turner, who’s .763 OPS when down 0-1 made sense for the Red Sox, who had just lost Martinez.
All I’m saying is that there is beauty in every nook and cranny in this dumb game we call baseball. You just have to pull out your magnifying glass sometimes to find that beauty and appreciate it for all that it is.
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