Plate Discipline Stats
About two years ago I attempted to delve further into plate discipline with two articles: Dissecting Plate Discipline Part 1, Part 2.
And then a year later I took an additional look at plate discipline: More on Plate Discipline
All batters now have plate discipline stats available dating back to 2005. Here’s what they are:
- O-Swing%: The percentage of pitches a batter swings at outside the strike zone.
- Z-Swing%: The percentage of pitches a batter swings at inside the strike zone.
- Swing%: The overall percentage of pitches a batter swings at.
- O-Contact%: The percentage of pitches a batter makes contact with outside the strike zone when swinging the bat.
- Z-Contact%: The percentage of pitches a batter makes contact with inside the strike zone when swinging the bat.
- Contact%: The overall percentage of a batter makes contact with when swinging the bat.
- Zone%: The overall percentage of pitches a batter sees inside the strike zone.
What you’ll want to know is the major league averages for each stat:
Season O-Swing Z-Swing Swing O-Contact Z-Contact Contact Zone 2005 20.3% 68.0% 46.0% 51.8% 88.3% 80.8% 53.8% 2006 23.5% 66.6% 46.1% 57.4% 88.5% 81.0% 52.6% 2007 25.0% 66.6% 45.9% 60.8% 88.2% 80.8% 50.3%
All the location data is from Baseball Info Solutions and you can find all these stats in the player pages at the very bottom: Vladimir Guerrero
David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.
erik said,
April 28, 2008 @ 8:51 pm
wow. this site keeps getting better and better. thanks!
dan said,
April 28, 2008 @ 9:27 pm
You might want to add league averages for each category on the player pages, or at least make a show/hide toggle for them. That would be much easier than finding this post every time someone looks at these numbers, especially for someone who didn’t see this post.
David Appelman said,
April 28, 2008 @ 9:31 pm
Dan, good idea. The other option would be to make them all above/below average stats, not entirely sure how I feel about that though…
Jason said,
April 29, 2008 @ 10:13 am
Man, I *heart* fangraphs.
Jason Collette said,
April 29, 2008 @ 2:19 pm
Just when I thought fangraphs couldn’t get any better……we’re not worthy
Sky said,
April 29, 2008 @ 5:25 pm
Awesome. Any chance we’ll get to see any more analysis with TLV data?
thebear said,
April 29, 2008 @ 7:03 pm
this is awesome thanks so much with your help last year i dominated fb and now I am already doing it again this can only help!!
Dave Cameron said,
April 29, 2008 @ 7:30 pm
Absolutely, Sky. We’ll be doing a lot more TLV analysis as the year goes on.
Edgar for Pres said,
April 30, 2008 @ 2:03 pm
Why is O-Contact% consistently rising? Random or real?
Slyde said,
May 1, 2008 @ 1:20 pm
Is the Zone% data accurate for the Los Angeles teams? It is suspicious to me that for the last 2 seasons, all of the qualified hitters from the Dodgers and Angels have the lowest Zone% in the league. This can’t be right, can it?
David Appelman said,
May 1, 2008 @ 1:23 pm
We’re looking into the LA teams situation. It does seem a little weird.
cris said,
May 8, 2008 @ 6:26 am
this is really good stuff. is there any way we can break this down into where it is in the pitch count. the 0-2 data would be really interesting.
cris said,
May 8, 2008 @ 6:31 am
all right, nevermind. i now know what TLV is. (newbie)
Chris Dial said,
May 12, 2008 @ 1:58 pm
Could you add the columns for production (even just BA) for O-swing” and “Z-swing”?
David Appelman said,
May 12, 2008 @ 2:47 pm
I’m going to look into this today since average stats for the plate discipline stats have been highly requested.