Let Us Avoid Wasted Plate Appearances

Statcast has given us many new ways to evaluate quality of contact.  You can look at exit velocity and launch angle (although I wouldn’t recommend it). You can look at my xOBA, or MLB’s xwOBA (cough). You can look at Value Hits, or MLB’s Barreled Balls. Each of these focus primarily on great contact, or frequency of good contact with respect to plate appearances.  However, bad contact is important too, right?

In the past I have written about Poorly Hit balls, which you may find interesting to read. These combined with Value Hits paint a picture of the upper and lowest levels of contact a batter creates or a pitcher surrenders. Well, there is a different way of looking at these figures, and with my notoriously bad ability for naming things (the title of my senior thesis in college was “Introduction”), I have come to call this “Wasted At Bats.”  Others have told me that’s a terrible, misleading name.  To which I have no response other than “I’m sorry.” But let me explain.

This stat, which I will call henceforth “Wasted”, represents the ratio between plate appearances that end in a near automatic out to at bats that end with a near automatic extra base hit.  The formula is simple:

(PH% + K%) / VH%

You know strikeouts are almost always outs. Very, very rarely can a batter reach first base, although it *can* happen.  Well, PH% (Poorly Hit) are somewhat similar, although not *quite* as automatic. Poorly Hit balls are outs about 98% of the time. Not automatic, but as close as you’re going to get.

To put this in perspective, Bartolo Colon has 309 plate appearances in his career to date. He has five extra base hits. Base hits on Poorly Hit balls are about as common as Bartolo Colon extra base hits.  It happens, but don’t count on it.

The denominator, Value Hits, are exceptionally well hit balls. They are, in some ways, similar to Barreled Balls, but they are not calculated in the same manner. Value Hits are judged purely by success rate. It doesn’t care if you hit the ball 30 miles per hour or 120 miles per hour; if a disproportionate number of similarly hit batted balls are extra base hits, it will register a Value Hit. Value Hits have a .879/.874/2.606 slash line.  Yes, 2.606 slugging. It also has a 1.424 wOBA.  These balls are exceptionally valuable.  Hence the name.

Alright, back to Wasted plate appearances. This number should represent roughly how many plate appearances in which the batter attributes zero value to his team for each plate appearance in which they produce tremendous value.  So, for example, so far this season Eric Thames has a Wasted Value of 3.18. This means for each exceptionally well hit ball (ie, including but not limited to his 11 homers) he has 3.18 at bats in which he attributes nothing to his team.  This is great, he has been one of the most productive hitters in the league.

On the flip side, Jose Reyes has a Wasted Value of 70.5.  So, for every 70.5 plate appearances he will have one Value Hit.  Ouch. This year he’s been the weakest hitter by this metric with at least 40 plate appearances.

In terms of fantasy value, you could say this Wasted figure represents roughly how many plate appearances a batter may have, on average, between potentially high scoring (in terms of fantasy value) plate appearances.

Note, on xStats.org, you can calculate this quite easily for both left handed and right handed splits for batters and pitchers. For now, I’m just going to touch on the 2017 batters (no splits).

Eric Thames is having an absolute monster of a season to date, and I’m sure Reds fans are sick of looking at him. He obviously made this list, and he’s near the top. However, he isn’t the king.  

Oh no, that goes to our boy Bryce Harper, who has apparently returned to MVP form after a disappointing (and injured) 2016 campaign. So far this season, Harper has hit fewer low line drives/high ground balls (0-10 degrees) and instead hit many more of what I call High Drives, balls on a 19-29 degree launch angle. He has also increased the average exit velocity on his High Drives from 93 mph to 99 mph. The exit velocity leap may be unsustainable, but the increase in quality of launch angle is a call back to his 2015 MVP season.

(You can read about these classifications here)

A lot of the guys on this fewest Wasted Plate Appearances list made it here by hitting the ball exceptionally well. Some made the cut by having very few weak at bats. Like Freddie Freeman, for example.

Freeman is the best hitter in the Braves lineup.  Everyone can agree with that.  Especially after Kemp got injured. Unfortunately for Freeman and the Braves, this has given pitchers very little incentive to give him a pitch to hit, and as a result he has had 15 walks, three intentional, so far this season. Considering the guy had 89 walks last season and 55 the year prior, this is a pretty ridiculous.  He’s on pace for 130 walks this season.

Having said that, Freeman is also, apparently, a 40 home run guy. He has seven to his name thus far, even after surrendering nearly 20% of his plate appearances to walks.  You can do the math in your head on this one.  ~10% Value Hits, ~23% Poorly Hit, ~18% Strikeouts, ~18% Walks… that is almost 70% of his plate appearances accounted for.  Only 30% of his plate appearances have ended in a manner other than an automatic out, a near automatic hit, or a walk. Wow!

Corey Seager and Adam Jones are in a different category still. Seager and Jones each have very high medium contact hit rates.  They have a good Value Hit rate relative to the league, although not quite up to par with the others on this list. They also have few Poorly Hit balls and Strikeouts. However, they each have a large number of medium contact. Not great contact, not terrible contact. Just somewhere in the middle. However, wrack up enough medium contact, and you will produce value, obviously.

Now, you might get a sense of a ‘three true outcomes’ type logic that I am applying to this. Rather than home runs, I have Value Hits, and rather than Stikeouts, I combined strikeouts and Poorly Hit balls. This is sort of an updated DIPS type argument, and a way of looking at the stats that you may find useful going forward.