The Other Fifteen

Reader DeRoMyHero asked:

Is there any way to judge a "good walk rate" (a.k.a. "plate discipline)? After all, not all walks are equally good for hitters or bad for pitchers.

1. For Rickey Henderson or Tim Raines, a walk is almost always good. Even though both had some power (especially Henderson), they created more problems by just getting on base.

2. For Barry Bonds, a walk (particularly with RISP) is usually bad -- especially with Pedro Feliz behind him. Maybe he should have expanded his SZ a bit, trading a few more outs for more RBI potential. Was he selfish to guard his stats at the expense of the team, or would his performance have slipped too much?

3. For some aggressive hitters (Aramis Ramirez, Michael Young), trying to get them to draw more walks would diminish their overall effectiveness. They do so much damage with fastballs early in the count that a walk would be a consolation prize.

4. A cleanup hitter like Adam Dunn accomplishes less with a walk than a leadoff hitter. The guy behind him likely is not as good of a hitter, and it takes at least 4 singles to score Dunn from 1B. Would he do more damage by being more aggressive?

5. A #8 hitter has to adjust based on the situation, i.e., he must be capable of being patient or aggressive. I ask this because I have seen reviews of Tyler Colvin that say he "needs more plate discipline". If he can produce like Michael Young when he swings, who cares?

Conversely, the Rangers have a young DH named Jason Botts, who has made a living in AAA of taking pitchers 3-2, then hitting the cripple fastball. (He is Adam Dunn with more speed -- BB, K, HR.) The jury seems to be out on whether he can hit anything other than a fastball down the middle -- a requirement in the ML, especially as a DH.

Has anyone come up with a way to analyze good walk rates based on type of hitter or spot in the batting order?

Nothing quite like a simple question, right?

First, a quick aside. When it comes down to winning games, we really don't care where a player's value comes from, just so long as he provides that value. You can have an all-glove, no-hit shortstop and a stone-handed Silver Slugger at the position - so long as their overall value is equivalent there's no difference in value between them.

Where the how becomes valuable is in player development and forecasting. You worry about how a player creates his value when you want to try and figure out what value he'll provide in the future, and how you can maximize his future value.

Okay, now back to bidness. First, we need to see if the premise is true - are some walks more valuable than others? To figure that we need a tool to value walks in relation to other events on offense.

I've made no secret of my deep and abiding love for linear weights. Simply put, linear weights are simply the average expected run value of an event. But we know that the run expectancy value of a triple is very different depending on whether or not the bases are loaded or empty - the linear weight tables used in, say, wOBA or Batting Runs don't look at the base/out state information when determining value. But nothing stops us from doing so.

[If you want to get more deeply into these things, Win Probability Added is the stat for you. Suffice it to say that there is a sabermetric holy war over WPA that is well beyond the scope of this article.]

Let's ignore out state for a moment and just look at run values based on men on base, which is what we're talking about here - the question is distinctly asking about the difference between Runs and RBIs, essentially.

And, yes, the relative value of a walk compared to the other positive offensive events decreases in "RBI situations;" this is why a single is generally more valuable than a walk - a single can advance the runner, while the walk can't.

But a walk does still have positive run value, especially compared to the negative run value of the out. And here is the cold, hard truth:

72% of all balls put into play are turned into outs.

There are, of course, things you can do as a hitter to help a particular batted ball beat those odds - you can hit a line drive, which is much harder to field than a ground ball or a fly ball, or you could avoid putting the ball in play together, and just knock it out of the yard. Both of those require making solid contact with the ball. And, I'm sure it won't surprise you to hear that the further a ball is from the center of the strike zone, the harder it is to turn it into a hit. You do not do yourself any favors by swinging at pitchers pitches - just because it would be more valuable for Barry Bonds to hit a home run than take a walk, doesn't mean that he's going to have much success trying to hit curveballs aimed at his shoelaces.

This is why plate discipline is so important, and it's not just because of walks and OBP. Everyone, repeat after me:

OBP is not plate discipline.

OBP is not plate discipline.

OBP is not plate discipline.

And, just to add on:

Walks are not plate discipline.

Walks are not plate discipline.

Walks are not plate discipline.

Both of them correlate well with plate discipline and are crude proxies of plate discipline, but they are not plate discipline.

The two best measures of plate discipline are IsoD and Pitches per Plate Appearance. Pitches per plate appearance is a wonderful, oft-overlooked stat - shocking, since it's so dirt simple that even ESPN provides it. IsoD is just a fancy name for walks over plate appearances; essentially OBP without the hitting. Anyways, here's all Cubs with 100 at-bats or more, sorted by IsoD:

And here's the same table, sorted by pitches per plate appearance:

First off, just because it's something I'm dying to point out: Ryan Theriot? Not a very patient hitter. (In fact, he was the WORST starter on the team when it came to pitches per plate appearance. True story!)

But now, let me get over that and try to provide some analysis. Remember? Walks aren't plate discipline - or rather, they aren't all of plate discipline.

Plate discipline, simply defined, is only swinging at your pitches, not the pitcher's pitches. Remember: balls are harder to hit than strikes. So you want to do a good job of making pitchers throw you strikes, and recognizing which pitches are good to hit and which aren't.

I won't belabor the whole idea of "pitchers counts" and "hitters counts;" anything that you're likely to hear about from TV announcers hardly needs my help in becoming common knowledge. Suffice it to say - you get better results as a hitter if you learn to take bad pitches, work yourself into favorable counts, and make the pitcher throw you strikes. [If you're interested in looking at the specific dynamics of how counts effect a hitter, I'm happy to oblige, though.]

So when we say we want Colvin to develop more plate discipline, we do want him to walk more. But we want him to walk more as a byproduct of swinging at pitches he can hit and taking pitches he can't. Better plate discipline makes you a better hitter - it doesn't just mean walks, it means more hits and more hits for extra bases.

Labels: Baseball, Linear Weights