Archive for z-contact%

This kind of post is right in Mike Podhorzer’s wheelhouse. We have a lot of common interests as far as baseball research topics are concerned — namely, xK%, xBB% and xBABIP — but he’s typically the one who periodically updates RotoGraphs with x-leaders and x-laggards.

So, again, this would be the kind of post Pod would tackle: an update on which starting pitchers will likely regress in their strikeout rates (xK%). But instead of using the xK% equation, to which the above paragraph is hyperlinked, I want to focus on a particular metric: zone contact rate, or Z-Contact%.

I’ll be up front about this: I haven’t done much research regarding pitcher zone contact rates and how it sticks from year to year. That’s primarily what this post will entail, and my evidence is largely anecdotal. But it’s important to note that zone contact rate plays a profound role in determining a pitcher’s strikeout rate; the Pearson correlation coefficient between K% and Z-Contact% is -0.72. In other words, K% and Z-Contact% are strongly negatively correlated.

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A couple of weeks ago, I investigated Justin Verlander’s resurgence. I found reasons to validate his hot streak but turned up additional question marks along the way.

One of them was his zone contact rate (Z-Contact%). At 79.7 percent, it would have been the second-lowest of his career by several percentage points (despite not performing “at peak”). However, I realize now, unfortunately, that I must have encountered a glitch in the leaderboards — his Z-Contact% as of August 21 (because the post, despite running the same day as his Aug. 26 start, was published prior to it) was 85.7 percent.

Regardless, it got me thinking what affects a pitcher’s zone contact rate because it correlates very strongly with strikeout rate (R-squared = .594). User DoubleJ speculated about the metric via comment on one of last week’s posts:

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After evaluating Zack Wheeler and Jacob deGrom in my previous post on the 2015 Mets Commanding Rotation, I was hoping to follow-up by looking at pitch release point consistency for a number of pitchers that prevented contact in the zone but didn’t have elite swinging-strike/contact rates. Initially, I found good results using root-mean-square deviations.

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