Each Thursday we will be covering different statistics that have very strong uses for fantasy. They are not stats that get used for ranking, but they can greatly affect your team. Some we already use on this site, and others we will discuss if they can be used for our analysis.
Part I
Hitting skills can be broken down into two parts. The first we will cover this week and the second will be next Thursday.
Judging Contact and Eye
The first part of a hitters ability lies in picking pitches to swing at and then making contact with the pitches they chose to swing at. So how can we break down these attributes?
Walk Ability
First is the ability to take a walk, which is easily assessed by BB%. How they get to that BB% can be found by using some underlying numbers found at FanGraphs.com. O-Swing% is the percent of times a hitter swings at pitches outside of the strike zone. Follow that up with O-Contact%, which gives the percentage of times they swung and hit pitches out of the strike zone.
Looking at the best eye in baseball, Albert Pujols, you can see he has continually had outside swing rates of less than 20% and had contact rates over 70% on those swings the past two years. On the other hand Kevin Kouzmanoff swings around 30% of the time at outside of the zone pitches and only hits those pitches around 50% of the time.
You will find that the best OBP players take a large percentage of these outside pitches. A hitter who takes greater than 80% of the outside pitches will have a much better OBP than another hitter who swings more, even if he has a good O-Contact%.
Contact Skills
With contact skills you can look at K% and Contact Rate, but what are the underlying stats for these? This time we can start with Z-Swing%, but not all pitches in the strike zone are good pitches to swing at. So in this case we should stick to Z-Contact%, which is how many pitches in the zone he hits when he swings.
We can stick with Albert Pujols again as his Z-Contact% is an amazing 93.5% and a poor contact hitter such as Jack Cust is at 71%.
O-Contact% also comes into play as well in the final contact skill of a player. Some players may not have great walk rates as they swing at a larger number of outside of the zone pitches, but they can still have an impressive average and OBP by making good contact with all pitches swung at. A good example is Dustin Pedroia, who makes contact on 84% of the balls and 95% of the strikes that he swings at.
Putting it all Together
Contact Rate and K%/BB% are only the beginning when looking at a hitter's skills. You need to look at the breakdown of when they swing and make contact to really tell how good a hitter is. Two players could have the same final contact rate, but which pitches they are swinging and making contact with will affect how well the pitch is hit, as well as the resulting outcome.
Part II
Next week we will look at how this as well as other factors affect a hitter's final BABIP, batting average and OBP.
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