Victims of the swinging strike (blocked)

Last week we looked at the masters of the “swinging strike (blocked),” the pitchers who were best able to induce swings at balls in the dirt in 2016. I won’t rehash the genesis of this examination, as you can read about that in last week’s piece; suffice it to say, a particularly wild day from Edwin Diaz earlier this year was the motivator. Today, with a tip of the cap to swing-at-anything legend Vladimir Guerrero, we use the same criteria to examine which batters were most and least susceptible to baseball’s unhittable pitch — a ball in the dirt.

Gif via MLB.com

As it was last week, the data sets used here are all relatively simple Baseball Savant queries. I’ll just quote the methodology exactly as it was written in the previous piece.

Find the total number of pitches classified in MLB.com’s Gameday as either “Ball In Dirt” or “Swinging Strike (Blocked)” then divide the whiffs — swinging strike (blocked) — from that total number of balls in the dirt. We’ll call it the “Whiffs to Balls in Dirt Rate,” listed as WH/BD % on the following leaderboards.

The only difference this time is that we changed the search from pitchers to batters. Without further ado, the leaderboards.

Tyler Naquin claims the top spot, as he swings and misses at 61.8 percent of the total pitches in the dirt he sees. There are nine players with a whiffs-to-balls-in-dirt rate above 50 percent and while one of them is a former batting champion — remember how Dee Gordon won a batting title!? — none of them are especially known for having top-tier plate discipline.

The uppermost portion of this list isn’t filled with the league’s poorest offensive players. In the top 50 we see names like Adam Jones, Chris Davis Jake Lamb, Adam Eaton, and Odubel Herrera. These are all quality, productive major league hitters who don’t have outlandishly above-average swing rates in general — even Chris Davis, despite the strikeout rate and possibly valid preconceived notions — but they are apparently vulnerable to balls in the dirt.

If you go ahead and sort by the lowest “WH/DB %” on the leaderboard you’ll find Paul Goldschmidt, the king of laying off balls in the dirt. Goldschmidt saw 93 pitches of this nature last year and only swung at three of them. Three. Total. There were 14 other players who tallied a whiffs-to-balls-in-dirt rate below 10 percent, but none of them saw near as many pitches as Goldy. As you can see from the scatter plot below with some outliers highlighted, Goldschmidt is in a class all his own.

Chart via Baseball Savant

The sample sizes are generally pretty small here, as they encompass a snapshot of just one season, and they’re going to be even smaller as we move forward to parse the data in regard to count and pitch type. But a snapshot of data, even if it can’t be extrapolated to definitive conclusions, can still be informative.

Now we’ll take a look at whiffs-to-balls-in-dirt rate in certain contexts. The minimums have been dropped as they all represent smaller pieces of the overall leaderboard.

You’re not going to see a lot of intentional pitches in the dirt when the hitter is ahead. The batter is shrinking his zone and looking for a good pitch to hit and the pitcher is generally looking to throw strikes and get back into a competitive count. That said, if you’re a big league hurler who has fallen behind to Odubel Herrera, it’s not crazy to throw one in the dirt and hope he’ll chase, as it happened half the time in 2016.

It’s interesting to see Christian Yelich here, as he’s not thought of as a free-swinger. His swing rates are generally a little below league average and he is regarded as one of the game’s best hitters. In a small sample like this sometimes unexpected names will pop-up, and we can’t really make sweeping judgements about these smaller context outcomes. While Herrera is 21st on the overall leaderboard, having faced a total of 66 balls in the dirt in 2016, Yelich doesn’t appear because he didn’t face even 25.

Is Yelich more susceptible to chasing a ball in the dirt when he’s ahead in the count? Maybe. He’s such a tough out in general that in a low leverage situation it might be at least worth trying a spiked curveball on 2–0 or 3–1.

The sample size is a little bit bigger here because a pitcher is much more likely to bury one when they are ahead in the count. Since this is the most likely situation to see a ball in the dirt, a lot of the names at the top of this list mirror the names at the top of the overall leaderboard.

Seeing a great player like Adam Eaton with a 75 percent whiffs-to-balls-in-dirt rate when behind in the count is interesting. According to PITCHf/x, in 2016 he did swing at pitches outside of the zone 2.6 percent more than league average, but that’s hardly an enormous difference. His swing rates in general were right in line with the rest of the league. Apparently his Achilles’ heel was chasing a pitch in the dirt when behind.

Taking behind in the count even further to behind 0-2, we see Eaton is still near the top, but it’s grizzled veteran Carlos Beltran and utility-man Brock Holt who were most vulnerable to the ball in the dirt with their backs against the wall. They both swung and missed 80 percent of the time.

Hunter Pence was the least likely to bite in this situation as he swung just once in 16 opportunities for a league best 6.3 percent whiffs-to-balls-in-dirt rate when down 0-2. As if we needed more evidence that Pence is not of this world.

Here’s a breakdown of the worst whiffs-to-balls-in-dirt rate by pitch type.

You’ll notice that except for the curveball, most the sample sizes are especially small. It makes sense, a curveball lends itself to being buried in the dirt far more easily than any other pitch type. With the splitter there were only two players who saw more than 10 pitches in the dirt — Josh Donaldson being the other — so it’s a leaderboard that relies heavily on circumstance, opponents, and pitch selection.

Since curveballs are the most meaty of all the pitch types here’s a further breakdown of just that pitch type.

Again we see more of the same gentlemen from the top of the overall leaderboard, but Freddy Galvis really sets himself apart in this particular case. In 2016 Galvis saw 29 curveballs in the dirt and swung at 26 of them. There’s been a lot of small sample size prefacing in this article and while I won’t claim that it doesn’t still apply here, an 89.7 percent whiffs-to-balls-in-dirt rate on 29 curveballs seems significant. At the very least Galvis should see a steady diet of curves in the dirt until he proves it’s a pitch he can lay off.

On the other end of the spectrum, special acknowledgement must go out to Buster Posey, Jhonny Peralta, JJ Hardy, and Jorge Soler for not offering even once at a curveball in the dirt last season. That’s damn impressive.

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Balls in the dirt are such a rarity overall that the ability to consistently not offer at them appears not to be a make or break skill. Plenty of baseball’s top offensive threats find themselves with a high whiffs-to-balls-in-dirt rate relative to the rest of the league. Still, as Paul Goldschmidt will attest, it doesn’t hurt to be able to spit on those pitches.