Of All The Things Australia Has Brought To The World, Yahoo Serious Might Be The Most Significant

by Jeff Sullivan on Jan 27, 2009 6:29 PM PST in Miscellaneous

Of all the things center fielder Franklin Gutierrez brings to the Mariners, patience at the plate might be the most important.

I think most educated readers will respond to this in one of two ways:

(1) What? Really? I mean - what? Really?

(2) Only the Mariners could bring in a guy with 27 walks and celebrate his patience

The article goes on to talk about how the Mariners need to see more pitches - which is probably true - but uses Gutierrez as an example - which is questionable. Yeah, he rarely swung at the first pitch of an at bat last year, but the suggestion that this trait made him "a pitcher's worst enemy" is more than a little bit laughable, considering his .307 OBP and .691 OPS. That Gutierrez made opposing pitchers throw one or two more pitches to him per game than they would've to an average hitter means basically nothing given that he also made a ton of outs.

Honestly, you hear people talk about raising the other guy's pitch count and getting to the bullpen all the time, but the merit of the whole idea is overstated. For one thing, relievers are better than starters, especially starters who've already thrown a bunch of pitches. If anything, you shouldn't be in any kind of hurry at all to chase a starter from the game once he's racked up a decent pitch count, because the guy who relieves him is probably going to be harder to hit. And for another, if part of making the starter work means you find yourself in more 0-1 and 1-2 counts, then that's bad, because it puts the hitter at a severe disadvantage that more than cancels out whatever benefit there may be to getting into the bullpen.

Forget making the other guy work. Forget building up pitch counts. While there are upsides to that approach, there are also downsides that call into question whether or not it's the right thing to do. Rather than going out of their way to work the count, all I really want to see the Mariners do is swing at more strikes and fewer balls. It's not about taking pitches so much as it's about taking the right pitches, and this is an area in which the Mariners have been sorely lacking for half of a decade.

There's a big difference between patience and discipline. It's my hope that the team is focused more on the latter than the former, because successful execution of the latter is going to be far better correlated with the consistent production of runs.

1 recs | 47 comments

Comments

We play team Australia in Spring Training

Robert - January 27, 2009 reply

Nice post.

.Taylor - January 27, 2009 reply

"Of all the things Australia Has Brought To The World, Yahoo Serious Might Be The Most Significant"

You know, not enough people acknowledge this.

msb - January 27, 2009 reply

I know those words, but that sign makes no sense

G_ - January 27, 2009 reply

Who was it at the feed ...

who made the comment about the A’s not teaching patience so much as drafting guys who already had a good idea?

msb - January 27, 2009 reply

When I saw Shannon Stewart play for a while...

…this sort of thought ran through my mind. Shannon had a pretty decent career walk rate—not huge but not insignificant either—and when he hit, you got the idea that he had a plan up there, that he was going to swing if he thought he could hit it and he was going to keep the bat on his shoulder if he didn’t think he could hit it. He probably could have been a little less aggressive and taken a few more walks, but it probably would have cost him some hits in the process.

ubelmann - January 27, 2009 reply

To me, the most impoartant part of this article isn't that they think Guttierez will draws tons of walks

It’s that they think anything he does will be more important than being one of the best (potentially the best) defensive players in baseball.

Maybe that’s just me talking crazy though.

Vatinius - January 27, 2009 reply

They are trying to convince people Guttierez does add something with his bat.

If Guttierez can make SportCenter’s top plays 4-5 times in April or May; people will start to believe his glove has the value we think it does.

mark sobba - January 27, 2009 reply

Well, Jim Street doesn't necessarily speak for the M's front office

Zduriencik has already made it clear that he loves loves loves Gutierrez’ defense. In fact, I’m not sure there’s a quote of Z saying anything about Gutierrez’ bat.

JLC - January 27, 2009 reply

He has more or less said that it has potential

Jeff Sullivan - January 27, 2009 reply

Which is a nice way of saying

well, it sucks, but he’s still young so it has some upside.

To be honest, even if he puts Wlad 08 offensive numbers, at least he will have an awesome glove.

Fin - January 28, 2009 reply

I read it as

Anything he does with the bat is gravy because gadzooks his defense is going to be awesome.

Personally, I hope he becomes the new Beltre. His bat won’t be quite as good, but he also isn’t going to cost us anything for a while.

JLC - January 28, 2009 reply

Beltre is an awesome hitter. Safeco damages his numbers.

Please take that back.

Fin - January 28, 2009 reply

I remember that Edgar use to get a lot of credit for "hardly ever swinging at the first pitch."

Maybe that’s where this kind of viewpoint comes from. Then again, Edgar is a much better hitter than most, so he could afford to get himself into an 0-1 every once in a while. And, if the pitcher missed with his first pitch, than even better for Gar.

Sentinel - January 27, 2009 reply

According to the pitch-by-pitch data that bb-ref has...

Edgar swung just 14% of the time at the first pitch and the league average over his playing time was 30%. And he hit .376/.396/.642 when he swung at the first pitch. (I understand the 15 HBP boosting the OBP, but I’m really not sure how he managed 16 BB including 1 IBB on the first pitch. He was just that good, I guess.)

ubelmann - January 27, 2009 reply

Swung != made contact with

Graham MacAree - January 27, 2009 reply

I don't think that's right, though

This seems to indicate that “first pitch” only includes PAs that end on the first pitch. And most of the rest of the splits wouldn’t make sense unless you interpreted it this way. There are 0 BB listed for 2-0, for instance, and I’m sure that at multiple points in Edgar’s career he swung at a 2-0 pitch, missed, and eventually walked. The only other walks listed in his record are on three-ball counts.

My guess is that it’s probably a glitch in the pitch-by-pitch data—the detailed pitch record for those walks doesn’t exist, so they wound up getting dumped in the default bin.

ubelmann - January 27, 2009 reply

That sounds reasonable.

But then your post wasn’t really about Edgar swinging at the first pitch. Unless you assume he also had 100% contact rate when he swung at the first pitch.

What you really meant was, “Edgar saw only one pitch in 14% of his at bats, and likely swung at the first pitch a great many more times than this, but these data don’t tell us how much.”

It’s certainly interesting, and I didn’t know BBref had that information, but it doesn’t really tell us anything definite about how frequently Edgar swung at the first pitch.

Vatinius - January 27, 2009 reply

Good point

I wasn’t very clear about the two sets of data, though. The 14% is the percentage of times he swung at the first pitch, but his stats on first pitch only tell us how well he did when he made contact. So it’s true that he didn’t swing much at the first pitch, but we’d have to dig further to see if he did well on the first pitch as compared to other hitters. (Of course, overall, his results justify his approach.)

Adding total plate appearances, the two sets of data don’t appear to match exactly, but looking at just his splits on “first pitch”, “after 0-1,” and “after 1-0” should give us a better idea on how well he did on the first pitch. There are 8656 PA total amongst “first pitch,” “after 0-1,” and “after 1-0.”:

669 PA — first pitch
4113 PA — after 1-0
3874 PA — after 0-1

Counting all of the “first pitch” outcomes as strikes, that would be a strike 52% of the time, whereas overall, pitches were strikes 56% of the time in Edgar’s PAs.

Presuming 14% swinging on the first pitch is about right, there were about 1211 PA where Edgar swung at the first pitch. Apparently 669 (55%) of those swings ended the PA. The other 542 PA would have gone into the “after 0-1” category.

So when Edgar chose not to swing at the first pitch, it was a ball 4113 times and a strike ~3332 times, so it was a called strike 45% of the time he didn’t swing. It would be interesting to know what the league average was on this, but I’m not sure where to get that.

If we compare to Ichiro, who has swung at 21% of first pitches, when he doesn’t swing at the first pitch, it has been a ball 2651 times and a strike 2033 times, so he got called strikes 43% of the time that he didn’t swing.

ubelmann - January 27, 2009 reply

Also...

If you look at the Mariners’ team batting splits, there are zero first pitch walks from 2008 to 1999, but there are 78 in 1998, with an abnormally large number of first pitch PAs. I’m going with glitch.

ubelmann - January 27, 2009 reply

Swung at first pitch, not put the first pitch in play

Vatinius - January 27, 2009 reply

To be totally fair

some teams’ bullpens stink but they have good starters so there’s some interest in getting a pitcher out of there early. Also, if you get a guy yanked in the fourth chances are the manager’s not going to go to his relief ace but to one of the marginal major leaguers whose names only get mentioned when trying to define replacement level.

Furthermore, while waiting till you’re down a strike to start flailing at every offering may seem like a bad approach at the plate, I would like to offer two words as counterargument: Jose Fucking Lopez. Maybe you think that his breakout year had to do with what some would call untapped talent, but everyone would agree that giving every single opposing pitcher a free strike to start an at-bat fucks with their minds and screws up their gameplan.

On a serious note, what was wrong with using Branyan as an example of a player who can take a walk since he actually is a patient hitter?

Bearskin Rugburn - January 27, 2009 reply

Good call on Lopez

He was the first name that came to my mind when I saw the article at Mariners.com.

MFAN - January 27, 2009 reply

There are definitely situations in which you want to get a starter out of there in a hurry

but, to me, that ought to be a byproduct, not a goal. Besides, practicing good discipline should get you to the bullpen anyway, so I think it’s important to focus more on having good at bats, as opposed to long ones.

Jeff Sullivan - January 27, 2009 reply

Taking pitches vs a RP is probably more important than vs a SP

RP usually are built to throw only a handful of pitches at max effort. If you get a RP 20+ pitches deep in an inning I bet their performance decreases drastically. If you can burn through a team’s bullpen during a series it can really put a crimp on their late game performance.

Edgar for Pres - January 28, 2009 reply

I'm not sure of the numbers on this,

but people have explained it to me that you want to make a good showing the first game of a series and get into the bullpen each game, as then later on in that series they will run out of options for good/rested relievers.

I was never sure I believed that, but unless I saw numbers either way, I’m tempted to say that it offers a decent counterpoint to your thoughts.

Not arguing the patient hitter vs. sit on your hands the first pitch argument, just the “get to the reliever” part.

Faux - January 27, 2009 reply

My favorite is the manager that believes in pitching roles with every fiber of his being, and isn't ready to pull his starter in the middle innings.

That little window of opportunity, usually in the 5th inning. When the starter is gassed, or just off, and the lineup has been drawing enough walks and collecting enough hits they’re about to roll through the hitting order for the third time.
Sometimes you (meaning me) get that little electric buzz up the back of your neck, a sense that your team is about to take the opposing pitcher to the woodshed. And when you look at the bullpen, not a pitcher getting warmed up. Good times.

Kermit. - January 27, 2009 reply