Tweet
I recently saw another thread having to do with BA’s on certain counts, and whether patience or aggression is a good thing or bad. Along with the more modern philosophy of OBP being a better hitting metric than BA, I’d been considering ranking OBP by counts just to see if there was much of a difference from hitting.
Although I couldn’t compute OPB by pitch counts for hitters because I don’t track hitters by counts, I played around with it using pitching data which I do do some tracking by counts. After I’d done what I could and got a look at the results, I was pretty much blown away but the tremendous differences.
Then it dawned on me the only counts walks can happen on are the 3 3 ball counts, so of course those 3 counts will likely be far higher in OBP than any of the others. DUHHH!
But none-the-less, tossing out those 3 counts, looking at the numbers can lead people to come to many different conclusions, one of the most interesting to me being that perhaps rather than trying to get a pitch to hit, perhaps it’s a smarter tactic to just do nothing until there are 2 strikes?
Although I couldn’t compute OPB by pitch counts for hitters because I don’t track hitters by counts, I played around with it using pitching data which I do do some tracking by counts. After I’d done what I could and got a look at the results, I was pretty much blown away but the tremendous differences.
Then it dawned on me the only counts walks can happen on are the 3 3 ball counts, so of course those 3 counts will likely be far higher in OBP than any of the others. DUHHH!
But none-the-less, tossing out those 3 counts, looking at the numbers can lead people to come to many different conclusions, one of the most interesting to me being that perhaps rather than trying to get a pitch to hit, perhaps it’s a smarter tactic to just do nothing until there are 2 strikes?