2019 Hitter Deserved K%

This is, and is not, a Mike Tauchman post. My relentlessly Tauchman-centric brand has been, in the words of beloved pal Sammy Reid, “hotter than the sun’s ass.” Tauchman has become the folk hero Yankees fans didn’t know they needed. I also have become insufferable to everyone within digital arm’s length of my Twitter account.

When I reviewed my bold predictions in July, I lamented Tauchman’s bad-luck strikeout rate (K%). By measure of “deserved” strikeout rate (I regressed the components of every hitter’s plate discipline against their strikeout rates to derive a “deserved” rate), Tauchman had been one of Major League Baseball’s unluckiest hitters.

Despite his recent torrid streak, Tauchman still emerges as one of 2019’s unluckiest hitters. That is why this is, in a sense, still a Tauchman post. But it’s also an Everyone Else post, in that I’m eager to unearth baseball’s luckiest and unluckiest hitters this year.

I outline the methodology used here in a January post in which I evaluated the 2018 season’s luckiest and unluckiest hitters by virtue of their actual deserved strikeout rates. However, it seemed as though certain hitters consistently over- or under-performed the “deserved” rate because the multiple regression model failed to adequately account for a hitter’s aggression/impatience or passivity/patience.

That is why, here, I will establish two deserved strikeout rates using all qualified hitter-seasons from 2014-18. One uses the typical plate discipline components (“xK% 1”):

• Swing and miss in the zone: Zone% * Z-Swing% * (1 — Z-Contact%)
• Swing plus contact in the zone: Zone% * Z-Swing% * Z-Contact%
• Swing and miss outside the zone: (1 — Zone%) * O-Swing% * (1 — O-Contact%)
• Swing plus contact outside the zone: (1 — Zone%) * O-Swing% * O-Contact%
• No swing, in the zone: Zone% * (1 — Z-Swing%)
• No swing, outside the zone: (1 — Zone%) * (1 — O-Swing%)

… and one uses only swings and misses, non-swings on pitches in the zone, and interactions among all of them (“xK% 2”):

• Swing and miss in the zone: Zone% * Z-Swing% * (1 — Z-Contact%)
• Swing and miss outside the zone: (1 — Zone%) * O-Swing% * (1 — O-Contact%)
• No swing, in the zone: Zone% * (1 — Z-Swing%)
• In-zone swing-and-miss * out-of-zone swing-and-miss
• In-zone swing-and-miss * in-zone non-swing
• Out-of-zone swing-and-miss * in-zone non-swing

I hoped these interactions might capture the hitter passivity-aggression spectrum more effectively.

The table is long. Extremely long. Because 340-plus hitters have recorded at least 150 plate appearances in 2019 (the arbitrary threshold I imposed for this exercise). Forgive me in advance for its, uh, longness.

Some at-a-glance takeaways:

• Tauchman ranks 8th- and 16th-unluckiest. His deserved strikeout rates of 21.8% and 21.4% suggest he should stay afloat at his .378 batting average on balls in play (BABIP) crashes down to Earth. This is why I loved Tauchman to begin with: he not only flashed massive power but also boasted above-average contact skills — a special combination of skills, and one that 2019’s plate discipline outcomes have betrayed.
• Wil Myers has been bad this year, but maybe he hasn’t deserved to be this bad.
• Cavan Biggio’s extreme patience gets him into strikeout trouble, but perhaps he has some good fortune him awaiting him on the horizon.

On the flip side of things…

• David Fletcher is king of contact-oriented aggression, but maybe he doesn’t quite deserve a single-digit strikeout rate. Hardly anything to write home about, though.
• Cody Bellinger has made legitimate contact-based strides, but his gains may be outstripping his deserved outcomes by a substantial margin — something that could have implications on 2020 projections for him.
• Yadier Molina might have finally reached an age-related crossroads.

Lastly: don’t forget to click the table headers to sort!