![]() ![]() They’re a corner case, but they’re also a major part of baseball.Ī two-strike count does crazy things to your breakeven. In all my math, you see, we’ve left out the issue of two-strike counts. ![]() But we’re missing a key part of the swing decision tree. So that’s it, right? Swing less and profit. But for small changes, they absolutely should, and that’s what Gallo did in 2019. If he tried to swing at only 10% of pitches outside the zone, say, I doubt the breakevens established here would hold. And of course, this math only makes sense on the margins. At the same time, that gives him the opportunity to dial up the aggression a bit - he’s now getting more pitches to hit, and the whole point of Joey Gallo is smashing hittable pitches. That happened in 2019 - Gallo’s zone rate was the highest of his career. If pitchers attack the zone more often, the cost of a zone take goes up (because it happens more frequently). There are interesting levels to this decision. Given that he cut his chase rate by 8% while only lowering zone swings by 8.9%, he’s coming out well ahead in the deal. For every extra 1% of pitches outside the zone where he leaves the bat on his shoulder, he can afford to take 2.7% (percentage points, in both cases here) more pitches in the zone after accounting for the fact that well less than half the pitches he sees are in the strike zone. Swinging at a ball costs 166 points of wOBA. Letting the ball go past when so much of his game is driven by power on contact within the strike zone is a fraught process.ĭespite what I just said about the cost of taking a strike, the math is pretty clear. ![]() The reasoning behind this is pretty clear he does whiff a decent amount, but when he makes contact, hoo boy does he make contact. Taking rather than swinging away costs him 102 points of wOBA. On the other hand, it’s not great for Gallo to take a pitch in the zone. 166 points of wOBA is the difference between Mike Trout and Orlando Arcia. The league average is 143 points, so he’s not the most extreme outlier, but it’s worth thinking about how big that gulf is. The costs and benefits are so dramatically different than everything else that the situation merits its own analysis.Īn out-of-zone swing costs Gallo, on average, 166 points of wOBA. One important caveat: I prefer to strip two-strike counts out of the equation. ![]() The cost of taking a strike is kind of the same the difference between how much a called strike costs you and your expected return on a swing. Roughly speaking, the cost of swinging at a pitch outside the zone is the difference between the value of a ball and the value of your expected outcome given a swing. Last year, I came up with a framework to evaluate these swing decisions. That came at the cost of lowering his zone swing rate by 8.9 percentage points, from 74.4% to 65.5%. That’s 8% of pitches outside the strike zone that put Gallo ahead in the count instead of either being a poorly struck ball in play or a swinging strike. Gallo’s chase rate fell from 32.2% to 24.2% in 2019. 586 when making contact with a ball in the zone, while baseball as a whole comes in at. 336 wOBA when putting a ball outside the strike zone into play, which is only marginally better than the league average of. To make matters worse, Gallo isn’t even a particularly good bad-ball hitter for his career, he’s produced a. In 2017, his 36.1% zone rate was the lowest in the majors.Ĭombine those low zone rates with Gallo’s abysmal contact rates, particularly on out-of-zone pitches (he’s been one of the worst two players in the majors in out-of-zone contact rate every single year of his career), and the calculus is clear: swing less, profit more. In 2018, it was even more severe his 38.1% zone rate was fifth-lowest in baseball. To wit: in 2019, 39.9% of the pitches Gallo saw were in the strike zone, a rate that would have been 30th-lowest in baseball if he had enough plate appearances to qualify. He has what Eric and Kiley call a grooved swing - his swing rides a consistent path, which makes it hard to adjust to pitches away from his preferred target area, and given how much damage he does when he connects, pitchers are doing their utmost to avoid that target area. And for someone like Gallo, that makes a ton of sense. That’s not all he did, but it’s a lot of it. What did Gallo change to turbo-boost his game? He started swinging less. ![]()
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