Fun With Swing Rates

"You can’t hit the ball without swinging the bat, meat!"

That quote has stuck with me ever since it was repeated ad nauseum in MVP Baseball 2005, which might still be my favorite video game of all time. But as I was repeating it to myself the other day when reading Part 4 of Matt Swartz' five-part series on game theory in baseball, I found myself wondering if it was actually true.

I mean, I know it has to be true, since you can’t HIT the ball without swinging.

But what about being a productive player without swinging the bat often? To answer that question I created a Fangraphs custom leaderboard for the 143 qualified batters from this past season showing various performance metrics and plate discipline metrics.

Can I Help You? No, Just Looking.

The chart below shows the league’s most infrequent swingers, as determined by Zone Swing %, which I decided to use instead of just Swing % because you can’t fault patient hitters for watching bad pitches.

The list has some surprises and some, umm, not-so-surprises. At the top are guys like Carroll, Revere, Andrus and Weeks, who are all low-power hitters who likely try to work walks or look for certain pitches to put into play. While their OBP’s aren’t that high, all but Weeks had above-average BABIPs and they all had below-average K-rates, indicating this is likely a strategic element more than a flaw.

Then there’s Youkilis, Prado, Mauer, Ellis and even Trout, who are all higher-OBP players with some moderate power. While some of them strikeout a fair amount, Prado and Mauer don’t. This is also probably the group that would have the best reputation as being "good" players relative to the others on the list.

And then there’s J.J. Hardy, whose .282 OBP doesn’t really fit on the list. Dustin Ackley and Weeks are the only other players near the top with poor on-base performance, and I found it weird to see a pretty notorious power-only guy among the least free-swinging batters in the league.

Does It Matter?

To try and make some generalized conclusions, I split the player list into buckets based on Zone Swing % and compared the average in certain metrics. The point was to see if players who take more strikes perform worse or if it makes no tangible difference. My hypothesis was that the overall value of the players probably wouldn’t change much, but we’d see the free swingers sacrifice average and on-base ability for increased power. Let’s have a look.

This is where things get a bit more interesting. In our first three buckets, we see the trend that I outlined as our kind of "expected outcome," where OBP is sacrificed for SLG.

It also makes sense that we see Contact % decline as Zone Swing % increases, as it confirms that these players are actually displaying a strategy here rather than a flaw. That is, because the players who swing less often also have high contact rates, it appears they are exhibiting a desire to wait for their pitch, so to speak. The fact that O-Swing % trends with Zone Swing % also makes sense, as they are related in a fairly logical manner.

What I found most interesting, perhaps, was that the "super-swingers" in the highest bucket kind of bucked the trend, showing higher averages, BABIP and ISO than any other group. It seems, based on OPS, that the best players happened to move to this group.

Perhaps success begets confidence, which begets a more free-swinging attitude? Or maybe swinging early in the count is beneficial to hitter success? More follow-up research is required, of course, but I thought the result was interesting nonetheless.

What are your thoughts, meat – can you, in fact, hit the ball without swinging the bat, so to speak?

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