If the pitch is a strike and moves enough that a batter can’t hit it, it probably started out of the strike zone and therefore, he didn’t swing. Conversely, pitchers that batters are swinging and missing at usually start as strikes and break out of the strike zone.

Called Strike% should be a better indicator, then, than Z-Contact%.

Still, I’m not gonna argue with the numbers. I’ll probably just argue with my wife instead. And probably not about O- or Z-Contact Rates.

Sorry that it’s available only to subscribers, but I wrote on article on July 1, 2009 on BaseballHQ.com on this topic too. Key findings were:
- Of course K/9IP tends to persist from one year to the next, but adding Swinging Strike % (which is 1 – contact %) doesn’t appear to help. For the data set as a whole, the prior year’s expected Dom based on Swinging Strike % provides very little predictive information that wasn’t already captured in the prior year’s Dom.
- However, there is predictive information when I looked at just the pitchers in the top 5 percentile. Out of 45 pitchers with expected Dom far below their actual Dom, 37 out of the 45 saw their actual Dom fall during the next year.

My article cited the prior research on the topic that I found helpful. The first research I know of that said that swinging strike % or contact % wasn’t very predictive of future changes in K/9IP was a 2005 article by James Click.

Among pitchers with at least 50 IP, Clippard was 8th lowest in all of the MLB with a contact rate of 68.7%

His line drive % was also 5th lowest among all pitchers (with 50 IP) at 12.8%

And of course… he sported the 4th lowest BABIP in the bigs (with 50 IP) at .207

I know this article was about contact% but looking at all the stats I just posted, it seems to me like missing bats, and getting weak contact when you do have a pitch hit is actually a skill the pitcher controls.

Am I interpreting this information wrong or does there seem to be a pattern that pitchers with low contact%’s are more likely to have some control on how hard a ball is actually hit? A skill, every pitcher would love to possess.

These correlations between pitching numbers are far less frequent and dramatic than some might think.

I did a bunch of stuff a few months ago on some of these stats (most of the stuff under “Plate Discipline,” velocity, and movement, looking at the Pitch Type Linear Weight data, and found that basically nothing correlated strongly.

Who knew that fastball velocity has absolutely zero to do with fastball effectiveness? Not me, until I ran that.

Anyway, this gives me some relief that SOMETHING in pitching influences something else; thank God we don’t have to take absolutely everything on a case-by-case basis.

If anyone cares to read my findings on that, check out http://bleacherreport.com/articles/216816-heres-a-thought-examining-fastball-effectiveness.

Anyways, great read as always, Carson! A lot of your pieces fascinate me.