What If Javier Báez Stopped Swinging for a Week?

Sometimes the scouting report on a player is so straightforward that it doesn’t require a full sentence:

Javier Báez: Throw outside zone.

Among players with at least 150 plate appearances in 2024, only Bryce Harper is thrown to in the zone by pitchers less often than Báez. Here’s a top 10 leaderboard:

Many of the players in the table above show up in another leaderboard, one that expands the data, going back to 2019. Adding in a 2,000 PA qualifier keeps Bryce Harper at the top (43.9%), followed by Javier Báez (44.2%), and Salvador Perez (45.0%).

Javier Báez has always been a free swinger. That’s not a hidden data point uncovered by stellar analysis. Fans, pitchers, coaches, and even grandmas know that Báez is going to take his cuts. FanGraphs writer Justin Choi authored a wonderful piece breaking down a Báez/Kevin Gausman showdown that presented the intricate relationship between pitcher and Báez. Let’s do a quick one of our own, Báez vs. Nick Pivetta on May 30th of the 2024 season:

Pitch 1: Nick Pivetta throws a big, loopy-breaking ball. Báez almost swings out of his shoes, 0-1:

Pitch 2: Báez misses an opportunity and takes a high fastball for a called strike, 0-2.

Pitch 3 and Pitch 4: Pivetta comes back with one fastball on the edge of the zone (ball, 1-2) and one giant slider (ball) that misses by a foot, 2-2.

Pitch 5: Báez strikes out on a bizarre-looking sweeper:

It was this at-bat that made me write down the title of this article as a note to explore later. Who knows what would have happened for Báez at 3-2? It’s possible that by not swinging at any of these pitches, Báez would have been standing on first base. The weird part about this at-bat was that it seemed like Báez bounced back and forth between being patient and overly aggressive. He started aggressively with a big swing on a breaking ball, then it’s like he takes a deep breath and tries to get back in the count with patience, taking a strike but also taking two balls. However, patience is so friggin’ hard in this day and age, and Báez couldn’t stand around any longer. He struck out.

Kevin Goldstein wrote It’s Probably Time To Be Concerned About Javier Báez a few years ago and now, fast forward to the present day, and we’re way beyond “concerned”. Besides a slight resurgence in 2021, Báez’s wOBA has been tanking as pitchers give him good pitches to hit less and less. He has adjusted by not adjusting and swinging outside of the zone more and more:

What if Javier Báez stopped swinging for a week? Why a week? As the saying goes, baseball is a game of adjustments, and if pitchers determine that, “Javy ain’t swinging”, they will adjust by attacking the zone. Let’s stick with one week and conduct a simulation. I went to Báez’s game logs, opened up the data to encompass 2021 to the current day, and randomly sampled seven daily zone rates. I ended up with the following:

[50%, 46%, 47%, 50%, 47%, 42%, 20%]

Remember that league average Zone% currently sits at 51.8% (PitchInfo), so we can see how pitchers typically throw the ball in the zone to Báez less often than average. We could really nerd out and determine if the game-by-game Zone% selected at random is a good sample of Báez’s true Zone%, but these are actual rates that Báez has faced in the past. Certainly, he could see them again. I’m sure a few statisticians are criiiinging after reading that last sentence. Try to keep your composure. I then used those zone rates to generate 100 pitches that would be either balls or strikes. For the first 50% Zone% day of this little experiment, I had a list of 50 balls and 50 strikes.

Once I had my daily Zone% creating my daily pitch likelihood, I gave Báez four at-bats per day for seven days randomly sampling one pitch at a time. Since Javy isn’t swinging, the maximum amount of pitches he can see is six. I wrote some code that called a strikeout if the strike count got to three and a walk if the ball count got to four. This is simple baseball.

The major issue with this is that pitch-by-pitch sampling is not random. If a pitcher gets Javy to a 3-0 count, the next pitch isn’t a random chance at a ball or strike. Again, just try to keep calm. Now that I’ve sampled four at-bats per day for seven days, let’s take a look at how this would change Báez’s current OBP of 0.212:

Up, up, up it goes! From a fantasy perspective, 14 additional walks would have to generate a few additional runs and, maybe, stolen bases. But in reality, one week isn’t enough to make up for the $20 (auction calculator, default settings) Javy has cost fantasy managers this season. But, it might do something. Then again, do we really want to watch a guy who can blast the ball into the seats just not swing? Well, maybe for a week. It has happened before. Maybe not to such an extreme, but some of you may remember Yasmani Grandal in 2021 when he decided to swing nearly as low as only 20% of the time!

The old adage says that you should just be yourself and Javier Báez is a free-swinger being himself. But, wouldn’t it be cool if, just for a week, he went rogue and experimented a little bit?