June 14, 2011

Chad is Rad

Tom Tango notes that Chad Billingsley knows his sabermetrics, but he needs to work on his percentages. Tom quotes from this post at Dingers:

It varies. For guys who I know won’t swing first pitch, I’ll throw a batting practice fastball for strike one. Just a straight fastball down the middle, 87 or 88 miles per hour. We know that. There’s a 99% chance he’s not going to swing at that first pitch.

Well, that’s bullsh!t Chad. A 99% chance for some batters to not swing at a straight fastball down the middle at 87 or 88? Is there even ONE batter in all of MLB like that? Even pitchers-as-batters will swing at that more than 1% of the time. And, has Chad ever done that anyway?

Thanks to data provided by Baseball Analytics, we can see that since 2008, Chad threw 161 first pitch fastballs down the middle of the plate. The average speed was 91.2 MPH. Hitters swung at the pitch 49.1% of the time. They put it in play 31.1% of the time. On that pitch, they hit .553/.542/.745 for a .530 wOBA in 50 PA.

However, 110 of those pitches resulted in Chad getting ahead 0-1 (one of those pitches was called a ball). After an 0-1 count, batters hit .209/.260/.306 against Chad. Combine that with the high offense when you put the ball in play, and ball down the middle should result in over a .300 BA for the opponents. In other words, it’s not the best strategy.

3 thoughts on “Chad is Rad

  1. Hans

    Most likely some of those are poorly located pitches. Could you break it down by batters swing % on the first pitch?

    Throw out the data for those hitters who swing at the first pitch more than a certain percentage of the time, otherwise you’re lumping in Chad’s mistakes along with what he claims he’s successful at doing, and it’s not as good of a test.

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