Comments on: What the Fukudome Happened to Kosuke?

By: shilzzz

shilzzz — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:31:28 +0000

that low and away stuff killed him, and pitchers figured that out around the time that o-swing went crazy.

By: gnomez

gnomez — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 06:55:20 +0000

Bot.

By: Gerry Ximenez

Gerry Ximenez — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 14:23:32 +0000

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By: David MVP Eckstein

David MVP Eckstein — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 07:10:06 +0000

Kosuke Fukudome should just quit playing baseball and become an umpire. See the name link for the proof.

By: Neil

Neil — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 15:25:14 +0000

Does a hit chart measure the force of the hit?

I watched him against the Mets and Keith Hernandez hated his swing (at the time). Kosuke steps in the bucket/bails out and is only able to drive inside pitches. So even if he is able to get his bat on an outside pitch, it is always going to be weakly hit. There’s a big difference in staying in the box and driving the ball to all fields and being a pull hitter who has good enough bat control to push outside pitches in play, albeit very weakly.

By: Jenny.ch

Jenny.ch — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 06:01:08 +0000

It looks interesting to me,thanks for sharing this out.

By: Mike

Mike — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 23:59:30 +0000

Wow, definitely. That is a huge percentage change, and would almost certainly affect his BABIP, not to mention explain how 3-4% of his ABs went for BBs to Ks. This would make for an interesting study, if one hasn’t already been done: O-Swing’s correlation to BABIP.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 21:05:48 +0000

I think the most important factor in Fukudome’s decline was his huge change in plate discipline. For the first 3 months, Fukudome had a O-Swing% of 16.17%, compared to 24.87% for the last 3. That kind of plate discipline leads to a lot of weakly hit balls that don’t fall for hits. It was obvious from watching games that Kosuke was simply not himself at the end of the year.

By: Mike

Mike — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 01:37:35 +0000

Obviously Fukudome uses all fields, but there is no hitter in baseball that gets a shift where an outfield position is left unmanned. The point was that each outfielder could be shifted individually. That spray chart on MLB.com is great. Interesting that there is a sizable gap between SS and second base in the outfield where no singles landed all season, suggesting a LFer could play pretty tight up against the LF line. The difference this could make in his BABIP can’t be much, but it’s a factor beyond dumb luck, and would be exacerbated by Fukudome’s continually lessening power.
My main point to all this is that the luck argument isn’t very persuasive: there are quite possibly other factors that just don’t show up in the available splits, so I thought I’d raise an anecdotal possibility that I’d noticed over the course of the season.

By: David Golebiewski

David Golebiewski — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 00:25:56 +0000

I checked for those sort of splits on B-R, but I could not come across anything like that.

And I do think those stats are relevant- you suggested that a positional adjustment may have accounted for Fukudome’s drop in production, but his spray chart is pretty much all over the place, not suggesting any particular “hot spot” where consistently puts the ball in play. That would appear to work against the idea of shading to a particular spot.

Fukudome’s MLB spray chart further illustrates his distribution of hits:

http://mlb.mlb.com/stats/individual_player_hitting_chart.jsp?playerID=493120&statType=1