![]() Can a metric like D-Swing% explain exactly how much damage a hitter does when swinging, which could potentially explain more about a hitter’s production overall? As I found in my article on Kelenic, a hitter’s production is best modeled by how much success they have when swinging, and the top hitters in baseball differentiate themselves by doing a lot of damage on their swings. That’s why chase rate, and how it relates to walk rate, becomes really important.īut chase rate isn’t the be-all, end-all for hitters. When you get on base more than 60% of the time, it’s impossible to be a bad hitter. Barry Bonds hit a ton of homers, but it was his absurd walk rates (thanks to pitchers being afraid of him) that allowed for consistently great performance. With so much potential variability when putting a ball in play, a walk is one of the most consistently good outcomes for a batter when they’re at the plate. It is true that hitters who swing at fewer pitches outside the strike zone will walk more, and walking is one of the best things a hitter can do. The power of O-Swing% is why people love to cite chase rate for hitters. For all models, I just used a linear relationship of 2021 hitters with at least 250 plate appearances. Adjusting may be better, but there may be some important insights to be gleaned from the raw relationships themselves. For complete transparency, I’ll also provide the non-adjusted figures to avoid this. While the relationships do improve when adjusting for these factors, we may be capturing the relationship between zone rate and, say, walk rate, rather than exactly what we’re looking for this would be an example of overfitting. That doesn’t make this method inherently better, though. Without at least attempting to adjust for some of these variables, we may be missing out on conscious hitter tendencies that may be more the result of the pitches that they are seeing rather than their inherent swing choices. You may swing less at pitches in the strike zone if you are seeing more pitches outside, or you may choose to swing at pitches in the strike zone with which you can make contact (preferably hard), which may lower your Z-Swing% but raise your Z-Contact%. I ran a similar study, but I wanted to control for more variables - zone rate and contact rate - to isolate the effect of D-Swing%, as many plate discipline metrics are interrelated. They found that being more aggressive in the strike zone “helps the power but seems to slightly hurt the OBP,” but overall, they saw an advantage in using D-Swing% over the individual components. This exact question was actually explored on the FanGraphs community blog back in 2017, where user Dominikk85 broke hitters into top- and bottom-30 groups by wRC+, ISO, OBP, and BABIP to see if O-Swing%, Z-Swing%, or what they referred to as Z-O-Swing% had the biggest impact in explaining the difference between the groups. Is this a stat that tells us more about hitters than what we already have with the standalone O-Swing% and Z-Swing% stats? There were a couple comments about D-Swing rate on my Ruf piece, and that inspired me to look into it further. This isn’t the only way to succeed at the plate, but you would think that better hitters would have higher D-Swing rates on average. The idea behind D-Swing% is simple: Hitters should be better when they swing at strikes and take balls. In my most recent piece on Ruf, I cited zone-swing differential to conclude that while his overall swing rate is low, his discipline might not actually be that good, as he’s still swinging at a fair amount of pitches outside the zone, which you can see when you look at his below-average D-Swing rate. Chet Gutwein defined this stat as D-Swing% in his piece about the NL West, and Justin Choi wrote about it in an article on the Blue Jays’ aggressiveness in early counts. On a handful of occasions, though, writers here have used zone-swing differential. Under the plate discipline section of player pages and on our leaderboards, we list both O-Swing% and Z-Swing%. After that, a discovery that Darin Ruf is succeeding with one of the lowest swing rates in baseball despite not having phenomenal plate discipline on the surface inspired research into zone-swing differential and what it may tell us about a hitter. My piece on Jarred Kelenic sparked an article on take value and hitter approach. If you’ve read any of my articles of late, you would know that I am currently fixated on plate discipline.
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