February 9, 2010
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The 2009 Yogi Berra Awardby Max MarchiNovember 06, 2009 If you followed the blog I run for a couple of months before making it to The Show (i.e., The Hardball Times), you might remember a post about the bad ball swingers of 2008. Since Vladimir Guerrero is the poster boy of the third millennium greatest chasers, I gave the nickname "Vlad Guerrero Award" to the standings I produced. Here I'm going to revisit that post, but I have decided to change the name of the award. Since awards are named after retired players, I went to Yogi Berra, because many sources report him as a batter who used to swing at anything within his reach, from his eyes—and higher—to his toes—and lower. Before proceeding to the 2009 standings, let me remind you what I did a few months ago. First, I calculated the probability that a pitch is called a strike given its location. I calculated two sets of probabilities (one for right-handed batters and one for lefties), after standardizing the vertical component of the location taking the batter's height into account. Then I classified as a "bad ball" every pitch that had a probability lower than 10 percent of being called a strike. The cut point was arbitrarily chosen, so if anybody has a better option, the suggestion is welcome. Note: Repeating all the work I did on 2008 data I discovered a few errors in my code, so I urge you not to look at last year's result anymore. Here is a graphical representation of the bad-ball zones.  The first table I will present shows the top 10 bad-ball chasers; that is, the 10 batters with the highest percentage of swings on bad balls. Note: from now on I'm using 300 bad balls seen as the qualifier. Table 1 - Swinging percentage on bad balls. Top 10.
last first pct bad balls
Olivo Miguel 39 574
Guerrero Vladimir 36 559
Soriano Alfonso 36 877
Rodriguez Ivan 36 529
Sandoval Pablo 36 972
Gonzalez Alex 35 542
Molina Bengie 35 612
Aybar Erick 34 628
Pierzynski A.J. 34 635
Cedeno Ronny 33 417Some usual suspects come on top. A top 10 chart is often followed by a bottom 10 one, and I won't make an exception here, especially since the guys at the bottom of this list have the great virtue of letting pitches unlikely to be called strikes go by. Table 2 - Swinging percentage on bad balls. Bottom 10.
last first pct bad-balls
Castillo Luis 10 725
Abreu Bobby 10 901
Ramirez Manny 10 610
Willingham Josh 9 625
Bautista Jose 9 488
Scutaro Marco 9 827
Iannetta Chris 9 448
Drew J.D. 9 719
Jones Chipper 9 820
Cust Jack 9 855After what I wrote this summer on Marco Scutaro we should have expected him to finish down on this list. Do players mantain their chasing tendencies? In the following chart I have plotted the players' percentage of swings on bad balls in 2008 versus the same quantity in 2009.  It's quite clear that chasing balls is a permanent trait: To confirm what's already apparent in the above figure, the correlation between the plotted variables is 0.84 (with a 95 percent confidence interval of 0.79-0.87) The first time I wrote about the subject, I introduced the net run value on bad balls to quantify the cost of swinging at those pitches. For each bad ball I calculate the net run value as following:
So here's what players have cost their teams by not refraining from swinging the bat. Top 10, that is low cost for their team. Table 3 Net run value on bad balls. Top 10.
last first net run value
Suzuki Ichiro -1.99
Keppinger Jeff -3.67
Iwamura Akinori -3.97
Castillo Luis -4.17
Ruiz Carlos -4.28
Gerut Jody -4.37
Lewis Fred -4.52
Millar Kevin -4.59
Paulino Ronny -4.61
Hinske Eric -5.00Bottom 10, i.e. high cost. Table 4 - Net run value on bad balls. Bottom 10.
last first net run value
Longoria Evan -23.53
Teahen Mark -23.61
Pence Hunter -23.65
Francoeur Jeff -23.78
Cabrera Miguel -23.98
Morneau Justin -24.14
Cuddyer Michael -24.88
Peralta Jhonny -25.29
Soriano Alfonso -28.24
Howard Ryan -30.43Some of the players in the second list more than make up for their discipline shortcomings thanks to their powerful lumber; sometimes they might be deliberately giving up the chance of a walk because they feel their power is more needed. Soriano (I didn't want to point the finger at Francoeur, everybody's whipping boy when it comes to plate discipline), on the other hand, is listed at Fangraphs at 8.6 batting runs below average: his season would have been less disatrous had his bad balls swing percentage been closer to the MLB mark of 20.4 percent. What about pitchers? Do they take advantage of opponent hacking tendencies? You would expect that the less-disciplined hitters get the highest percentage of bad-balls. The correlation between bad-ball swing percentage and bad-balls seen percentage (out of all pitches seen), while significantly different from zero, is not very high at 0.255. Anyway there's at least one factor confounding the relation: the hitter's proficiency. Manny is in the bottom list of bad-ball chasers, but that's not a good reason for throwing him a lot hittable pitches. Here are the top 10 pitchers at making opponent fish. Table 5 - Swinging percentage induced on bad-balls. Top ten.
last first pct bad balls
Wuertz Michael 33 507
Pena Tony 30 352
Madson Ryan 30 369
Gregerson Luke 30 406
Nathan Joe 29 441
DiFelice Mark 29 302
League Brandon 29 391
Halladay Roy 28 1067
Rivera Mariano 28 342
Buckner Billy 28 432And now the bottom 10. Table 6 - Swinging percentage induced on bad balls. Bottom 10.
last first pct bad balls
MacDougal Mike 14 309
Wilson Brian 14 420
Aardsma David 14 370
Cecil Brett 14 474
Miller Andrew 13 438
Hill Rich 13 342
Lewis Jensen 13 334
Cabrera Daniel 13 371
O'Sullivan Sean 12 321
Swarzak Anthony 8 306The first list contains three notable cutterballers: Mo, The Doc, and... well.. DiFelice; the other seven have their top weapon in either a slider or a mid-90s fastball (or a combination of the two). A couple of flamethrowers (and a former one in Daniel Cabrera) appear on the second list as well, but for the most part you can not point out a dominant pitch in the repertoire of the pitchers among the bottom 10. Hey, I was forgetting to actually give away the Yogi Berra Award. We could give it to Miguel Olivo, because it's the batter with the highest percentage of swings on pitches way out of the zone. However, while Yogi used to throw his bat to any spherical object that happened to transit in the area where the game was played, his swings were successful more often than not, leaving opposing batteries wondering what they should have thrown him to avoid a double. Thus Ichiro could be crowned for having totaled the highest net run value with his hacks. But it doesn't sound good to me to attach an award to a negative contribution, so I will simply end this article with the list of the players with the most hits on bad-balls. Table 7 - Base hits on bad balls. Top 10.
last first bad-ball hits
Sandoval Pablo 68
Phillips Brandon 64
Polanco Placido 61
Molina Bengie 60
Ramirez Alexei 60
Gonzalez Alex 55
Suzuki Ichiro 54
Cano Robinson 52
Loney James 51
Aybar Erick 51The Award is yours, Panda! References and Resources PITCHf/x data from Sportvision & MLBAM. I used batter handedness and the coordinates of the pitch only when crossing the plate to estimate the likelihood of a pitch to be decreed a strike. Pitcher handedness, balls and strikes count and pitch type also have some weight on the umpire's decision. And the knowledge of the umpire tendencies may change the batter's threshold on pulling the trigger. Max has been writing about baseball for six years to an Italian audience. He can be reached via e-mail.
Jeff Z said...
Miguel tried hard all season to win this award and he was denied. Such a same. How can it not go to some that swings at pitches that bounce 2 feet in front of plate. http://www.drivelinemechanics.com/2009/9/13/1028086/fun-fact-s-miguel-olivo-addition Make sure to see the Gameday pic in the comments. Posted 11/06 at 12:12 PM
lookatthosetwins said...
Do you think a different strategy would be to assign a score for every ball swung at? So if the pitch has a 10% chance of being called a strike, the batter gets a score of .9. If the pitch had a 40% chance of being called a strike, the batter gets a .6. That way, the batters who swing at the absolute worst pitches would be penalized more, and someone who swings at something that is called a strike 15% of the time a lot could show up on the list. I realize that this might not be what you’re going for, but it might be fun to look at. Posted 11/06 at 08:01 PM
Paul Gottlieb said...
I know Yogi had a reputation for swinging at everything, but given that he struck out 414 times in 19 seasons (never more than 38 times in a single year), and he had 704 walks, his plate judgment couldn’t have been that bad Posted 11/07 at 01:00 AM
Max said...
Dave, lookatthosetwins, Paul, Posted 11/10 at 04:07 AM
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Great stuff, Max! I’m trying to reconcile (in my head) the two lists of most swings outside the zone and least runs generated outside the zone. I would have thought there would be decent mix between the two lists, but there isn’t. Soriano is on both lists, but I don’t think anyone else is.
So how does Ryan Howard wind up with the most negative runs “contributed” on bad balls, but not the top ten list of swings outside the zone? He never hits bad balls when he swings at them?
An interesting sequel might be diving into this data for specific batters. Not only the question I raise, but do some batters specialize in hitting certain types of bad balls (location or pitch type)?