Importance of 2 strike hitting

[dominik]

Inspired by the matt kemp thread http://www.baseball-fever.com/showth...r-in-MLB/page4

I wanted to ask how important 2 strike hitting is for overall production.

Some questions:
-what percentage of PAs go to two strikes?
-what percentage of hits are two strike hits?

It seems like the talent range with 2 strikes is quite small and all hitters suck with two strikes. however since a big chumk of PA do go to two strikes it still might have a not too small role.

of course there are secondary effects too like being able to be more patient with less than two and thus getting better pitches to hit and laying off more bad ball since you don't fear two strikes. this is a big effect too of course but we cannot measure that here so we must ignore that.

[brett]

One thing about 2 strike hitting that I like is to see a guy waste 3-4 pitches on foul-offs even if he ends up getting out. There are a couple of strategies I have seen with 2 strikes. One is to shorten up and try to put the ball in play. This tends to produce a quick and easy out. The other is to simply try to foul off everything and maybe you strike out, but maybe you last long enough to get a mistake pitch. Todd Helton is excellent at fouling off pitches with 2 strikes and creating some value even from an out.

[scorekeeper]

Inspired by the matt kemp thread http://www.baseball-fever.com/showth...r-in-MLB/page4

I wanted to ask how important 2 strike hitting is for overall production.

Some questions:
-what percentage of PAs go to two strikes?
-what percentage of hits are two strike hits?

It seems like the talent range with 2 strikes is quite small and all hitters suck with two strikes. however since a big chumk of PA do go to two strikes it still might have a not too small role.

of course there are secondary effects too like being able to be more patient with less than two and thus getting better pitches to hit and laying off more bad ball since you don't fear two strikes. this is a big effect too of course but we cannot measure that here so we must ignore that.

I’d say you were on the right track to find out some interesting information, but I’m not sure that with the very meager information you’ve asked for, much of a judgment can be made as to the relation of 2 strike hitting to overall production.

The percentage of PAs that see 2 strikes is pretty straight forward. Just to get an idea about what we’re talking about, I checked our HS team’s numbers for the 21 games this season. Of 763 PA’s, 309 went to 2 strikes sometime during the PA. That’s 40.5%. Of those 309, 48 ended in a base hit, or 6.1% of all PAs, or 15.5% of all 2 strike PAs.

But those are just gross numbers and don’t really tell a whole lot because there’s a lot of different ways they can be broken down. FI, did the PA start with a 1st pitch strike or ball, and how did the results differ depending on not just the umpire’s count, but the REAL count where they may have been 6 strikes in the PA?

[JDanger]

Inspired by the matt kemp thread http://www.baseball-fever.com/showth...r-in-MLB/page4

I wanted to ask how important 2 strike hitting is for overall production.

Some questions:
-what percentage of PAs go to two strikes?
-what percentage of hits are two strike hits?

48.8% of all PA's in 2011 saw two strike counts.
25.2% of all Hits in 2011 were off two-strike counts.

Source. Look for the row "two strikes".