Once hailed the savior of the White Sox, Gordon Beckham has suffered from the dreaded “sophomore slump” in 2010. In 430 at-bats as a rookie, Beckham put up a slash line of .270/.347/.460. In the off-season, Beckham was shifted to second base, where he was expected to make a bigger impact with both his bat and his glove. While Beckham has provided value with his glove in 2010, as a hitter he has completely collapsed. Beckham’s current slash line of .206/.283./252 has left many White Sox fans wondering about the future of their former top prospect.

A look at the advanced metrics reveals some troubling trends. Beckham’s solid walk rate has dropped from 9.5% to 8%, while his strikeout rate has risen from 17.2% to 19.6% in 2010. His swing rates reveal that Beckham has chased pitches out of the zone with more frequency in 2010. His O-Swing% (or percent of pitches he has swung at outside of the zone) has risen from 24.7% to 30.4% this season. While Beckham has actually made more contact with pitches out of the zone in 2010, they are leading to an increased number of infield flies. Beckham’s 16.1% infield fly rate is currently the 11th highest rate in baseball. Also troubling, is Beckham’s poor 15% line drive rate. While BABIP is typically a good indicator of luck, in Beckham’s case, it’s hard to argue he’s been unlucky. Beckham’s current BABIP of .250 would typically suggest improvement, but with such poor line drive and infield fly rates, it’s hard to imagine a big improvement if his rates stay the same.

During the season, some Chicago writers have suggested that Beckham may be pressed after experiencing failure for the first time in his career. While I cannot assess the mental state of Gordon Beckham, his current rates are so out of line with what we would expect that, as a fan, you have to wonder if Beckham is pressing. Last season, Beckham slugged 14 home runs in 430 at-bats. This season, his slugging percentage is actually lower than Juan Pierre’s (.258-.272). Another troubling aspect of 2010 is Beckham’s inability to hit a fastball. Beckham feasted on fastballs last season, hitting them for 4.8 runs above average (per FanGraphs). In 2010, that number has plummeted to -5.7, meaning that batters are able to blow their fastball by Beckham. Looking at Beckham’s pitch values is quite depressing. As a rookie, Beckham hit four types of pitches for a positive value (fastballs, sliders, change-ups, and curveballs). In 2010, Beckham has a negative pitch value rate against every one of those pitches. While his struggles against fastballs are the most pronounced, his ability to hit sliders and change-ups have dropped substantially as well.

Are these the symptoms of a player struggling to cope with failure for the first time in his career? While the answer to that is unclear, this has certainly been a “lost” season for Beckham’s development. His numbers, particularly his infield flies, home runs, and complete loss of pitch recognition seem to suggest a complete breakdown in 2010. In the same way that Alex Rios’ numbers last season were not an accurate reflection of his true ability, it’s fair to say that 2010 has not been an accurate reflection of Gordon Beckham’s true ability. Unfortunately, there isn’t much the White Sox can do to rectify the situation right now. The Sox are hesitant to send Beckham down to Triple-A, and would prefer that he work out his issues at the major league level. Unless Beckham can rebuild his swing and regain his confidence, Sox fans might have to wait until 2011 before they see “the real Gordon Beckham” again.

*This article was originally published on my personal sports blog FoulPole2Foulpole.com

As of June 15th the Rockies were 3.5 games behind the Padres for first place in the NL West and the general consensus is that the team is underperforming. With the pitching staff sporting a solid FIP of 3.67 (2nd in the NL) the finger pointing has turned to the offense. Whether or not the offense is to blame for the team’s “woes” (I’m somewhat skeptical, can you tell?) one thing is for sure, something is wrong with Todd Helton. Helton is experiencing what people are calling a “season long slump” (to which Chris Iannetta asks, “So does that mean there is such a thing as a ‘career long slump’?”) hitting .255/.361/.323 with 1 HR. He’s moved from third in the team’s batting order to sixth, and recently has moved back up to second in an attempt to get him kick started. Here I’ll examine what is different this year and why. First let’s take a closer look at what we already know: in 2010 Todd Helton sucks at hitting.

The first thing that should pop out at you here is not Helton’s subpar 2010 numbers, but how good his career numbers are. As a player ages and younger, faster, stronger, better looking players come along it’s easy to forget how great a veteran’s career has been, especially one as consistently good as Helton. Sure the T-1000 was super awesome with its mimetic metal alloy and shapeshifting and whatnot, but who paved the way for him? I’ll tell you who: Todd Helton.

Now look at those subpar 2010 numbers. Pretty bad. We are into June and Helton has accumulated a healthy 227 plate appearances. He hasn’t had a month with a wOBA higher than .335, in fact, he hasn’t had any period of anything close to resembling his career production all year. For a veteran player known for his solid swing mechanics and meticulous approach to hitting, it would seem that he would have figured it out by now. Or figured something out, it doesn’t even have to be IT. Just something.

“Maybe it’s just bad luck”, you say. Well, his BABIP is a pretty solid .309. Sure, it’s lower than his career mark of .336, but it’s not bad by any means. It’s not .318 wOBA bad. Of qualified players with BABIP’s between .300 and .310 only three of 19 have lower wOBA’s than Helton. Luck and BABIP have little to do with it.

Maybe he’s lost his great eye and is swinging at bad pitches. There might actually be something to this as it was reported that Helton was fitted with contact lenses on June 7th. However, nobody in that article seemed overly convinced they had fingered the culprit of Helton’s lack of production. Since getting fitted for the contacts his slash line is .292/.280/.333. Even in a small 25 PA sample, not exactly a ringing endorsement of the corrective lenses fix. The real question here is one of pitch selection, has there been a change? Given that his O-Swing% is 18% vs a career 17.6% chasing doesn’t seem to be the problem. If he were having problems recognizing pitch location or type his walk rates would most likely take a hit as well, but that’s not the case either. He has a solid BB% of 14.1% (career 14.5%). He seems to be seeing the ball just fine.

So what then? Where does that leave us? Is he really in a “season long slump”? A 227 PA aberration? Maybe, but let’s look at a few more pieces of data. One of the numbers that jumps out at me most is Helton’s 2010 K%. Known as someone who is a notoriously good two-strike hitter he has a career K% of 13.7% and has never had a K% above 17.7% (in 2001, when he posted an ISO of .349, so we’ll take it). As of June 15 Todd’s 2010 K% is 18.8%, the highest of his career and a far cry from the 13.4% of 2009. Helton has struck out 36 times in 192 AB in 2010, in 2009 he had 73 in 544. At his current pace he will accrue 102 strikeouts over 544 AB. He’s only ever K’d more than 100 times in a season once. Ok, now we’re getting somewhere: his balls in play are falling at a relatively normal rate, he’s not chasing pitches, he’s getting his walks, but he’s striking out at an abnormal rate. Maybe pitchers have changed how they approach Helton. Here is the pitch type data for 2009 and 2010 from TexasLeaguers.com:

2009

2010

Comparing these two tables gives us some interesting bits of information. If anything we can see that Todd is handling offspeed pitches better. Not only is he seeing more sliders (SL) and changeups (CH), but he is swinging at them less and whiffing less. This could be a pitch recognition issue, but I see something more glaring and problematic: fastballs (FF). Against fastballs his whiff rate is up, while foul and in play rates are down. Not only is he putting fewer fastballs into play, when he does put them into play he’s not doing much with them. Here’s what Helton did with fastballs put into play in 2009:

It’s clear that Helton sprayed fastballs all over the field pretty equally, and mashed mistakes to right field. Now take a look at 2010:

Big difference. The majority of the balls in play are to left field, and the mistakes he hits are obviously not going as far (as evidenced by his one home run). Granted, Helton has a history of driving the ball to the opposite field, but he has also shown the ability to hit fastballs to all parts of the park, something he is clearly not doing as effectively in 2010.

So what’s behind the Todd Helton Situation? All of this data suggests a slower bat. If you’ve watched him play you’ve no doubt seen him get beat by some pretty mediocre fastballs. Keep in mind Todd is going to turn 37 this year. Sure he played wonderfully in 2009 posting an OPS of .904, but that was coming off a year in which he only played in 83 games. Since 1961 only 22 players have had multiple seasons with an OPS of .900+ past age 35. The thing about bat speed is that once it’s gone it’s gone. The one hope is that there is a hitch or something mechanical in his swing that’s causing this, but, as I pointed out before, a hitter as good as Todd with the help of Don Baylor would have most likely identified a mechanical flaw by now.

As far as his numbers are concerned, if he continues to get regular at bats there does seem to be room for a small amount of regression (the good kind in this case). Will it be enough to keep him in the lineup? If not, what are the Rockies’ options? And what about next year and the year after that?

Austin Jackson is off to a brilliant start in his major league career.  But any discussion of his hot start invariably leads to discussion of his strikeout total.  His 63 have him just one behind the American League “leader”, Carlos Pena.  Several National Leaguers (six) are ahead of him including perennial air conditioner, Mark Reynolds.  We are conditioned to believe that strikeouts are at least as bad as WMDs and possibly worse than British Petroleum.  But what should we really make of all of Jackson’s strikeouts?  Are all strikeouts created equally?  Is he just flailing wildly and piling up lucky hits when he does make contact but otherwise striking out?  Or is there more to the story than just the negative connotation of strikeouts?

The Strikeouts

Let’s dig deeper into Jackson’s 63 punchouts and see exactly what we are dealing with in the youngster.  He is averaging 4.8 pitches seen per strikeout which I guess is essentially 1.8 when you consider that every strikeout will be at least three pitches long.  Kevin Youkilis, who is renowned for his plate discipline, sees an average of 5.0 pitches per strikeout, just 0.2 pitches more than Jackson.  In fact, the MLB average on the 12209 strikeouts this season is 5.0 pitches per strikeout.  Jackson is just 4% below the average, hardly cause for concern.

Just eight of Jackson’s 63 strikeouts (13%) have been the worst kind: good morning, good afternoon and goodnight.  Jackson’s 13% 3-pitch strikeout percentage is much better than the league average of 17% (2021-of-12209) and a good bit better than the average of all leadoff hitters who check in at 16% (211-of-1339).  Also, 19% of his strikeouts have gone to a full count which is 3% better than the major league average.  Hopefully he can learn to turn more of those full count plate appearances into walks as the season wears on; that will be instrumental in his development as hitter, but especially as a leadoff hitter.

One of the biggest arguments against strikeouts is that it eliminates the chance for a “productive out” which is just an out that advances someone.  By striking out, a player doesn’t put the ball in play and leaves the runner where they were when the plate appearance started.  Of his 63 strikeouts, 38 have come with the bases empty (60%).  This eliminates the “productive out” argument from more than half of his strikeouts.  By comparison, 57% of the entire league’s strikeouts have come with the bases empty.

Finally, let’s look at Jackson during the first inning when he is leading off the game.  The job of a leadoff hitter is to draw the pitcher’s arsenal out and give the team an early look at what he’s got for that game.  While 14 of his 52 leadoff PAs have been strikeouts, only two (14%) were 3-pitch strikeouts as Jackson averages 4.7 pitches per leadoff plate appearance that results in a strikeout.  His 3-pitch strikeout rate is below the major league mark of 16%.

The Performance

We deep dove into Jackson’s strikeouts so now let’s deep dive into his overall performance thus far.  Jackson is seeing 4.1 pitches per plate appearance which tied for 2^nd-best among American League leadoff hitters.  Elvis Andrus is leading the way at 4.2 and Jason Bartlett is tied with Jackson.  He is averaging slightly higher on leadoff plate appearances with a 4.3 mark.

In the first inning, Jackson has a .292/.346/.500 line with 14 hits, 14 strikeouts and four walks.  His 27% leadoff strikeout rate is significantly higher than the 19% for all of baseball, but he obliterates the league line of .246/.313/.355.  He has just one 1-pitch leadoff plate appearance (2%) and he ripped a double off of Dallas Braden, meanwhile the league’s rate is 7% on 1-pitch leadoff plate appearances.

For the season Jackson has just 19 1-pitch at-bats of his 249 (8%) and he is hitting .474 in those 19 ABs.  For the league, 11% of all ABs have been 1-pitch encounters and the collective batting average is .343 in those 7298 ABs.

The Conclusion

Jackson is off to great a start in his rookie campaign yet a lot of the focus lands on the strikeouts.  I am not here to say that he isn’t striking out a ton or that it’s awesome to strikeout that much.  In fact, he is on pace for 183 which would be 2^nd-most for a rookie in MLB history (Pete Incaviglia, 185), but he is also on pace for 49 doubles, 23 stolen bases and a .316 batting average.  Let’s not crucify Jackson for two months of data.  He struck out in 24% of his minor league at-bats and he’s at 27% so far as a major leaguer.

He has a 28.1% O-Swing percentage according to FanGraphs.com which is a measure of how many pitches outside of the zone he has swung at thus far.  That is about average in the American League.  Of the 83 qualified hitters in Junior Circuit, Jackon’s rate is the 39^th-highest.  As you can see, he isn’t just hacking away at the plate and some of his longer at-bats that are currently ending in strikeouts should soon turn to walks (or better) as he gets more and more comfortable as a big league player.

As we have seen, not all strikeouts are created equally.  With the proliferation of hackers in the big leagues in this era and their lack of shame associated with striking out, there is this desire to demonize the event for all players.  I definitely want to see Jackson strike out less if for no other reason than the fact that his BABIP of .432 will likely drop a bit more and thus he needs to put more balls in play otherwise his average will drop well below .300, but I also see that his strikeouts haven’t been a serious liability for the Tigers.  He has a pretty good idea of what he is doing at the plate, especially as a leadoff hitter in his first two months in the show.

He has acquitted himself very well at the plate while hitting leadoff and playing one of the most important defensive positions.  How often do we see guys much more hyped than Jackson perform significantly worse yet get pass after pass for their pedigree and excuses because the team has thrust them into a key lineup spot and/or primary defensive position?  It happens quite a bit.  (Matt Wieters anyone?)  So how about when someone actually performs well in a key lineup spot while playing elite defense, we actually applaud the performance instead of looking for the flaws to cut it down?  I am suggesting we ignore Jackson’s egregious strikeout total, rather make it a secondary headline or footnote to the overall picture with the central focus placed on his quality work in many other facets of the game.

When Yankeeist last looked at Alex Rodriguez’s declining power numbers, I (and several others) came to the rather obvious conclusion that his paltry 8.3% HR/FB rate would soon escalate. Alex’s five home runs since that point in time have indeed bumped his rate up, but it’s only sitting at 12.1%, still well below his 23.3% career percentage.

A-Rod has eight home runs on the season to date; the lowest number through 58 games of his career and only the second time he has accumulated less than 10 this deep into a season — in 1997, he had nine through 58 games with the Mariners. So what’s going on with Alex?

The below table shows historical batted ball numbers for A-Rod, his year-to-date home run totals (in this case, through the first 58 games of each season), and his season home run totals (all data c/o Fangraphs and B-Ref):

Despite five big flies, Alex’s fly ball percentage is down from when I last looked at the numbers on May 10. Accordingly, his line drive percentage is also down, to 17.9% (though this is barely off his career rate) and his ground ball percentage is up, to 46.2% (pretty well above his 42% career rate).

As you can see, Alex has never had a Fly Ball % this low in a full season for as long as Fangraphs has recorded this data, which partially explains why his HR/FB rate has only risen by 3.8 points — he’s just not hitting as many fly balls as he usually does. Assuming his Fly Ball % normalizes to his career rate, we should see a corresponding uptick in the HR/FB percentage.

Here are the different pitch types A-Rod has seen:

Pitchers are obviously aware that A-Rod isn’t hurting the baseball as much as he usually does, as they are challenging him with more fastballs than ever before. Correspondingly he’s seeing less of every other pitch type since May 10, with the exception of a slight increase in changeups and split-fingered fastballs. Looks like the book on ‘Rod remains challenging him with the heater, which means he’s going to have to make some adjustments to his approach, as there’s no reason Alex shouldn’t be able to adequately handle a steady diet of fastballs.

And here are his swing percentages:

Since I last conducted this analysis, Alex is swinging at even more pitches out of the zone (25.8%) but making less contact with them (60.1%), and also swinging at more pitches in the zone (65.7%) and making less contact with those as well (91.8%, down from a crazy high of 97.3%). His overall contact percentage is 81.4%, still a good deal higher than his career rate of 75.5%.

It would appear Alex’s biggest problem is that he’s trying to make too many things happen with the bat right now — swinging at pitches out of the zone has contributed to an above-average (for Alex) contact rate, which is resulting in more balls being pounded into the ground than lofted into the air (hence the career-low Fly Ball %).

Alex has also eschewed his trademark patience during the past month. He had 19 walks through 31 games, but has only walked seven times since then over his last 27 games. His OBP has dropped from .381 on May 10 to .360.

While A-Rod still has time to improve his numbers, and ZIPS ROS projection has him hitting a robust .284/.378/.512, .392 wOBA and 18 home runs the rest of the way, that would still only get A-Rod to a full season line of .285/.371/.499 with a .381 wOBA and 26 bombs, which would mark his lowest SLG, home run total and wOBA since 1997.

Basically, A-Rod needs to stop swinging at bad pitches, take a few more walks and show pitchers he can still punish the fastball if we’re going to see significant improvements in the Fly Ball % and HR/FB rate and get his numbers anywhere near his career line of .304/.389/.573. I realize that’s a rather obvious conclusion that probably didn’t require a comprehensive statistical analysis, but it’s nice to see that the numbers support it.

Larry Koestler eats, drinks, sleeps and breathes the Yankees at his blog, Yankeeist.

The legend of Dave Duncan is well known.  Pitcher A stinks and is released by his current team.  The Cardinals sign Pitcher A and he miraculously becomes a good pitcher.  Dave Duncan’s effect on these pitchers can be seen in the groundball rates.  Another NL Central pitching coach has a similar effect on pitchers’ strikeout rates.  Every year from 2001-2008, Cubs’ pitchers led all teams in strikeouts.  In 2009 they finished tied for second.  The northside pitching staff has seen plenty of turnover throughout those years, but the one thing that hasn’t changed is Larry Rothschild.  He has been the Cub pitching coach since 2002.

So does Rothschild really have an impact on his pitchers’ strikeouts.   To find out I compiled a list of all pitchers the Cubs acquired from outside the organization between 2002 and 2010.  According to the Sabremetric Library, K/PA becomes reliable after 150 batters faced.  After limiting my list to only pitchers who faced 150 batters as a Cub, I found their K% before they joined the team and during their time with Rothschild.  Here is the list.

Pitcher          K% Before    K% After    Difference
Matt Clement       17.60%       23.20%      5.60%
Antonio Alfonseca  14.70%       17.90%      3.20%
Shawn Estes        17.90%       14.70%     -3.20%
Mike Remlinger     22.30%       24.80%      2.50%
Greg Maddux        17.20%       15.50%     -1.70%
Glendon Rusch      16.70%       17.20%      0.50%
Latroy Hawkins     14.70%       19.90%      5.20%
Kent Mercker       15.60%       22.90%      7.30%
Ryan Dempster      18.00%       21.10%      3.10%
Jerome Williams    14.70%       12.30%     -2.40%
Bob Howry          20.30%       21.00%      0.70%
Scott Eyre         17.00%       23.60%      6.60%
Ted Lilly          19.60%       20.60%      1.00%
Jason Marquis      13.90%       12.60%     -1.30%
Neal Cotts         19.90%       22.70%      2.80%
Rich Harden        23.30%       29.10%      5.80%
Aaron Heilman      20.40%       20.80%      0.40%
Kevin Gregg        20.80%       23.80%      3.00%
Tom Gorzelanny     14.80%       23.70%      8.90%
John Grabow        20.50%       15.30%     -5.20%
Carlos Silva        9.80%       17.30%      7.50%

Only 5 out of the twenty-one pitchers in the list saw their K% decrease under Rothschild.  I assume Maddux didn’t learn anything he didn’t already know.  Clement, Gorzelanny, and Silva are the big ones.  Clement’s three best years were with the Cubs, and Gorzelanny and Silva were borderline major leaguers when they arrived in Chicago.  Even though he had Kerry Wood, Mark Prior, and Carlos Zambrano during the strikeout streak, we need to give Larry Rothschild credit for his influence on the high strikeout totals.

What if Stephen Strasburg had debuted against a team that can actually hit? In what should strike anyone as a ridiculous criticism, there have been a few people to point out that Strasburg didn’t exactly face a “real” major league line up in his record breaking major league debut. (A friend of mine joked that he made his 7th AAA start on Tuesday.) Yes–record breaking. I’ll add to Jack Moore’s point: Since 1920, only there have been only 67 games in which a  pitcher has struck out 14 or more batters and walked none. Strasburg’s outing was noteworthy because his is the only one in which that happened with 24 or fewer batters faced. Given that only 66 other pitchers have ever done something like what Strasburg did in his debut, the level of the team he faced seems like a pretty trivial point. This was dominance like we rarely ever see.

Nevertheless, what if Strasburg had faced a “real” line up in his debut? One of the beauties of sabermetrics is that we get to have this argument with math. If, against a real line up, you think he would have looked ordinary and I think he would have looked pretty amazing, we can set aside arbitrary opinions, lay out some points of agreement, and use our calculators to answer the question. Well, that’s a stretch. But at least we can get a sense of the significance that the Pittsburgh lineup made.

Strasburg was obviously on last night. Did he bring his best stuff? Maybe. What we saw last night wasn’t his true talent level. Nobody is that good consistently. Let’s call the talent level Strasburg brought to his debut his instantaneous talent level. That instantaneous talent level faced was in the run scoring environment that the Pittsburg Pirates create. The comination of the two was a .194 wOBA.  Sabermetrics gives us a tool for calculating match-ups known as  a log5 calculation. If we assume that a .298 wOBA is the Buc’s real talent level, we can isolate Strasburg’s instantanous talent level and give the most rational possible answer to the question “what if he’d faced a real line up?”

I’ll cut to the chase and save you some algebra: his instantaneous wOBA-against was .218.

Going back to our log5 calculations, that means the Yankees, if they brought their MLB leading .361 wOBA to face Strasburg last night would have wOBA’d .248. That’s something like the Astros without Lance Berkman or Hunter Pence.

Here’s the same calculation for every other team in the league.

Yankees		0.243
Red Sox		0.240
Reds		0.234
Brewers		0.227
Tigers		0.226
Twins		0.225
Blue Jays	0.223
Rays		0.223
Braves		0.222
D-backs		0.220
Rangers		0.219
Cardinals	0.219
Phillies	0.219
Rockies		0.219
Royals		0.217
Nationals	0.216
Dodgers		0.216
Cubs		0.215
Marlins		0.213
Mets		0.213
Angels		0.212
Giants		0.212
White Sox	0.210
Athletics	0.210
Padres		0.202
Indians		0.202
Orioles		0.196
Mariners	0.195
Pirates		0.194
Astros		0.182

Anyway, we’ll never know what St. Stephen would have looked like against one of 29 other clubs on June 8th, 2010. That’s not the point. The point is that we witnessed one of the great pitching performances in the history of baseball. It was dominance. This post sheds a little light on what dominance means.

About a month ago, I wrote an unintentionally controversial article about some puzzling patterns in Derek Jeter’s early season numbers.

There were two main contradictions within his statistics: that he was on pace for the best power numbers of his career while posting his highest ground ball rate ever, and that he was posting a career-low strikeout rate while swinging at a dramatically larger proportion of pitches thrown outside of the strike zone.

My critics claimed that I was reading too much into the stats too early in the season. Under normal circumstances I would have agreed, but it was more than the numbers themselves that were puzzling. When a person hits more home runs on fewer fly balls and makes better contact with worse pitch selectiveness, the results contradict the logic, no matter how small the sample size.

Four weeks later, I think it’s appropriate to revisit the situation and see how things are shaping up.

Overall, the discrepancies have become less dramatic, but the contradictory trends are still in place.

As I predicted, his power numbers have come back down to earth. He’s now on pace for 16 homers (down from 26 at last writing) and 98 RBI (down from 130). Neither would be a career high, but both would be above his norm.

But Jeter’s unprecedented groundball tendencies haven’t abated. Over two-thirds of balls off his bat (67 percent) have been on the ground—by far the highest such figure in the American League. While that’s a slight decline from the 71 percent mark he posted last month, it’s by far the highest of his career and a full 10 points above what he posted from 2002-09.

Meanwhile, his 16 percent HR/FB rate is the highest it’s been since 2005. Coincidentally, the 2005 season was the only other time in his career that his groundball rate hit 60 percent. So basically, the more he puts the ball on the ground, the more likely it is that each fly ball he hits will clear the fences. I’m not sure if that’s really a contradiction, but it’s certainly an odd correlation.

One thing is clear: this isn’t a common trend. This year, Jeter is the only player in the AL who has both a groundball rate over 50 percent and a HR/FB rate over nine percent.

But the more dramatic (and interesting) statistical oddity stems from the collapse of Jeter’s plate discipline.

Over his career, Jeter has been one of the most selective hitters in baseball, hacking at less than 20 percent of balls out of the strike zone. This year, that number has ballooned to 31.3 percent. Simply put, he’s chasing bad pitches. That’s not an insult or a criticism—that’s an indisputable, objective fact.

The sample size isn’t too small to start drawing conclusions. Jeter has seen 288 pitches outside the zone and swung at 90 of them.

As one might expect, this trigger-happy approach has had a negative effect on his walk rate, which, at five percent, is a career low. It’s less than half of the walk rate he posted last year.

Similarly, you’d expect his strikeout rate to shoot up into the stratosphere, right?

Wrong.

While Jeter’s 14 percent whiff rate is a sizable increase from last month’s nine percent figure, it’s still inexplicably lower than it ought to be, given Jeter’s history and his newfound aggressiveness.  How is that possible?

My first thought upon revisiting these numbers was that, in addition to swinging at more pitches off the plate, Jeter was starting to be less discriminatory with pitches thrown in the zone. That made sense, and I was embarrassed that I hadn’t thought of it a month ago.

But it turns out that’s not right either—in fact, it’s actually the opposite. This year, Jeter has chased a career-low 69 percent of balls in the zone, compared to 74 percent for his career. Simply put, Jeter is swinging at more bad pitches and fewer good ones.

I plugged in the numbers and found that, while 80 percent of the pitches he’s swung at since 2002 were good, just 69 percent of balls he’s chased in 2010 would have been called strikes.

And yet, Jeter’s 86 percent contact rate is the best of his career.

This just doesn’t make sense.

Ichiro Suzuki is a singular talent. He is fast, seeming to fly all over the outfield. He steals bases with great success — 45 while being caught only twice in 2006. He has a legendary cannon for a right arm. And he hits like a machine. He racked up over 2,000 hits in his first nine major league seasons, and was the second fastest to that milestone (to Al Simmons, who reached it in 12 fewer games). He does not hit many home runs or a particularly impressive number of doubles or triples. He piles up his hits by putting the ball on the ground and running to first base. Joe Posnanski recently explored Ichiro’s hitting prowess, coming to the conclusion that he is one of the few truly unique players in history.

What if Ichiro were slow? What type of player would he be if he were not able to knock out so many ground ball hits? For one possible answer to this question, I compared the rate at which Ichiro reached base on ground balls to the American League average. Baseball Reference lists batting average splits by hit trajectory, and I compiled the league numbers from 2003 through 2009. The league statistics for the first two years of Ichiro’s career, 2001 and 2002, differ significantly from the next seven, possibly due to different methods of categorizing ground balls. I omitted those two years, as well as this season’s small sample. During the seven seasons from 2003-2009, American League players consistently reached base at a .240-.245 average on grounders. Ichiro beat the average in every year, with a high of .368 on ground balls in 2007.

To get an idea of what type of player Ichiro would look like without all those extra hits, I normalized his ground ball hit rate to the league average for each season and recalculated his batting totals. This adjustment cost him 42 hits in 2007 and 44 in 2004, and no less than 14 in any of the seven seasons. For simplicity, I removed only singles from his batting line. I then searched for a player with career statistics similar to Ichiro’s adjusted totals and came up with an interesting candidate. The following table displays Ichiro’s statistics over the past seven years (again, discarding 2001 and 2002) without his extra ground ball hits, side by side with Curt Flood’s career averages.

This adjusted version of Ichiro is a near statistical clone of Flood, who played center field in the 1960s for the Cardinals. Flood was also a great fielder, winning gold gloves in each of his last seven full seasons. He is most famous, however, for starting a chain reaction that led to the free agency system when he refused a trade to the Phillies after the 1969 season. It marked the effective end of his career at just 31, as he played only 13 games in a comeback attempt in 1971. Despite now being inextricably linked with baseball labor history and not often mentioned for his playing ability, Flood was actually a surprisingly valuable hitter. He played in the offensively-challenged 1960s and was significantly above average with the bat for most of his career. Ichiro’s adjusted stats, in today’s era of power and on-base percentage, would be far less impressive.

Of course, this is all merely a thought experiment. Ichiro probably does have some control over where he hits the ball, as his New York Times profile explains. FanGraphs’s Jack Moore also explored Ichiro’s propensity to hit grounders to the opposite side of the infield at an abnormal rate. Thus, simply removing some of Ichiro’s hits does not show us the player he would actually be if he were not so fast. If he could not get on base so often on this type of batted ball, it is likely he would adjust his approach and that his numbers would reach a different equilibrium. What removing all of the extra singles does show us is just how much value those ground ball hits supply. Without them, Ichiro’s numbers look fairly pedestrian, especially in the era in which he has played. With them, Ichiro is Ichiro, and he will go down as one of the greatest and most dynamic hitters in baseball history.

This article originally ran at Ball Your Base.

Brian Matusz entered the 2010 season considered one of the top rookie pitchers in the game. Marc Hulet of Fangraphs recently wrote that he thinks Matusz will win the AL Rookie of the Year. Things haven’t been so rosy for the Baltimore lefty in the last month, however.

Matusz hasn’t pitched excellently in 2010 according to his peripherals. He’s better than his 5.8 ERA, but he’s worse than 3.8 FIP on account of an unsustainable 6.2% HR/FB. His xFIP of 4.6 looks a lot more like the pitcher that he is. He’s striking out a lot of hitters (7.4 per 9), but his fly-ball tendencies are extreme (46.5% over 446 batters faced) and his control looks spotty: 3.3 BB/9 this season.

It’s the last part I want to take a look at, because a (career) 3.1BB/9 is going to wreck a fly-ball pitcher like Matusz unless he can develop swing-and-miss stuff that will get him a strike out per inning. But here’s the thing: Matusz control has been impeccable through his major league career.

54.3% of his pitches have hit the zone since he first took the mound in 2009. For comparison’s sake, just four pitchers managed to throw that percentage of pitches (or more) in the zone last season: Ted Lilly, Cliff Lee, Johan Santana and Roy Oswalt (who tied Matusz’s 54.3%). Just below that are Justin Verlander and Scott Baker. Matusz has allowed 7.6% of hitters a free pass since his arrival. Of those six comparisons, the highest walk percentage was 6.5% (Santana), the lowest 4.4% (Lee) and the average was 5.6%. Somehow Brian Matusz manages to walk 35% more batters than the average of this group of similar pitchers.

It gets even stranger. Matusz throws pitches in the zone, but he’s not exactly a pitch-to-contact guy. His contact rate on pitches in the zone (=83.3%) is about 4% below major league average (~=88%). He does tend to allow contact on pitches out of the zone, but the net result is an average contact rate, and his swinging strike rate of 9.3% is 1% better than the major league average. He’s not throwing pitches in the zone because he gets behind in the count: his 62.0% F-strike rate place him around the top 15% of starters with 60 or more IP last season.

If we adjust his walk rate to reflect what pitchers with a similar rate of pitches in the zone do, Matusz would have just 15 walks this season and a 3.0K/BB ratio. That’s good enough to produce a 4.2 xFIP and 3.6 FIP. ( I calculated the expected walk rate at 6% of batters faced. I calculate expected HR for xFIP as 6.5% of line drives plus flyballs, i.e., balls in the air, rather than as proportion of fly balls to account for inconsistencies in LD and FB scoring.)

While it’s difficult to tell a lot about a pitcher from his plate discipline stats, two things do stand out: swinging strikes get Ks and pitches in the zone prevent walks. The correlation coefficent between BB/BFP and zone% was -.43 for 78 qualified starting pitchers in 2009, which is a pretty strong correlation for baseball.

It would be really cool if I had an explanation of Brian Matusz high walk rate, but it confounds me, and I’m completely open to suggestions. His walks look like an anomaly.

At age 23, Carlos Marmol made his major league début with the Cubs as a starter.  He was mostly dreadful in 2006, finishing with an ERA over 6.00.  Since then, he’s settled in as the setup man and now the closer for the Cubs and for the most part has been very good.  Since 2007, he’s averaged over 11 strikeouts per nine innings in each season, finishing in the top ten each season; this year, his strikeout numbers have been absolutely stupid.  Here’s a summary of Marmol’s rate statistics for his career, followed by his totals:

Marmol has always had issues throwing strikes, particularly in 2009.  He got away with it (mostly) by not allowing home runs and being a little lucky.  What really strikes me though is that with such high strikeout and walk rates, there is a lot of walking at the end of plate appearances against Marmol (either to first base or back to the dugout).

A couple of weeks ago, Dave A. noted that Brandon Morrow, Clayton Kershaw, and Rich Harden lead starting pitchers in keeping the ball out of play via walks, strikeouts, and hit batters.  They had “Ball-Not-In-Play” percentages in the lows 40s.  Check out Marmol’s career, and in particular, his start to 2010:

This year he’s moving away from his fastball and moved toward his slider more and more.  He’s also throwing harder (almost a full mile per hour faster than any previous season) and batters are not making contact with anything.  Hitters are hitting only 60% of the pitches they swing at, 20% below the major league average; he also leads the league by almost 5%.

It’s easy to see from his Pitchf/x data that Marmol might not have any idea where the ball is going when he throws it.  It’s almost impossible to keep up what he’s doing, but after watching him walk a Ranger and strike three out in the 9th inning during Sunday’s game, it sure seemed to me that some good major league hitters simply don’t have much of a chance against him right now.

This article was originally published on Knuckleballs.