Baseball Musings: Hit or Whiff

April 07, 2005

Hit or Whiff

The Day by Day Database is updated through yesterday. I was just using it to look at the batting leaders in strikeouts and see that MLB leader Mark Bellhorn has twelve at bats, five hits and seven whiffs. He either gets a hit or strikes out. The other interesting thing is that he hasn't drawn a walk yet.

Did the Yankees decide that since Bellhorn won't swing at pitches outside the strikezone, to see if they could exploit his high strikeout rate by giving him pitches at which to swing? Take away Bellhorn's walks, and he's not that good an offensive player. It did seem to backfire, as five hits in twelve at bats is a good performance, regardless of how the outs were made.

Posted by David Pinto at 10:59 AM | Players | TrackBack (0)

Comments

I follow the Red Sox closely and I like Bellhorn a lot. He didn't draw any walks against the Former Evil Empire, but he did see a lot of pitches. And if pitchers decide to pitch to him, he will get his hits. It would be nice if he can cut down on the strike outs, but I'll take either what he did last year or what he did this week against NYY.

Posted by: Rick Duncan at April 7, 2005 05:38 PM

I think too many people look at the high K's, see mediocre AVG/OBP/SLG numbers and dismiss him as a poor hitter. Trouble is that the notion of AVG horribly biases the casual fan's idea of what a good hitter should be. I'm going to throw out a metric that I think is a good summary of a player's hitting ability.

I think most people would agree that Varitek is a very good hitter. Not the best, but definitely a guy you'd like to have on your team, right? Well, Varitek averages .506 bases per plate appearance. I.e. in 1000 PA, you'd expect to see him get 506 total bases (including walks). He was even better in '04 with .543 B/PA. How does Bellhorn compare? Not far behind. Career, he's .497 B/PA. In '04, he was .524.

Okay, so Bellhorn is a pretty good hitter, but nothing compared to a guy like David Ortiz, right? Well, Ortiz is certainly better, but not by as much as you might expect, at least if you believe in this B/PA idea I'm throwing out here. Ortiz has a career .511 B/PA. He was .648 B/PA in '04.

What about the great Ichiro Suzuki? He has a career .479 B/PA. .490 B/PA in '04. At least according to this metric, Bellhorn is the better hitter. How can this be? Ichiro has better AVG/OBP/SLG numbers than Bellhorn. Yes, but those numbers heavily focus on hits. Consider a player that walks 25% of the time, hits a home run 7.5% of the time and strikes out the remainder of the time. His AVG/OBP/SLG numbers "look" mediocre: .100/.280/.400, but he averages .550 B/PA.

One thing worth nothing is that AVG/OBP/SLG can hide a player's "power," or average number of bases when ball meets wood (total bases divided by AB-K). Bellhorn had a somewhat mediocre SLG number (.444) in '04, so you might think that he doesn't have a lot of power, right? Wrong! Ball and wood don't meet all that often with Bellhorn, but when they do, beautiful things happen. When he made contact in '04, Bellhorn averaged .671 bases. That's slightly better than Varitek (.662), worse than Manny (.784) and Ortiz (.781) and much better than Ichiro (.499). Does this mean that Bellhorn should swing more often? No. I think his "power" number is so good partially because he is selective about the pitches he swings at. And I think the K rate is so high because he doesn't try to react mid-swing if the pitch isn't what he thought it would be. He'll take the K 'cause he knows that more often than not he'll make good contact (or get a walk) in the course of a PA.

Sorry if I rambled too much...

Posted by: Jason at April 8, 2005 09:28 AM