Plate Discipline (O-Swing%, Z-Swing%, etc.)
Description:
If your favorite player has a bad walk rate, why is that? Have you ever wanted to know if a player is good at recognizing the strike zone? If so, here are the statistics for you:
- 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.
- F-Strike% – The percentage of first pitch strikes.
- SwgStr%: The percentage of pitches a batter swings and misses on.
Context:
Here are the league averages for each of these statistics for 2010:
Things to Remember:
- These statistics are useful for evaluating hitters and pitchers, with SwStr% being especially important when looking at pitchers.
Links for Further Reading:
Plate Discipline Stats – FanGraphs
Steve is the editor-in-chief of DRaysBay and the keeper of the FanGraphs Library.
You can follow him on Twitter at @steveslow.
1
What is the definition of F-Strike?
Hrm, odd…didn’t mean to forget that one. It means “First Pitch strike percentage”. I’ll include it up above.
What exactly does the zone percentage quantify? Is it the % of pitches found within a standardized or by-the-book strike zone regardless of the call made by the umpire? Or perhaps a sum of the in-zone pitches plus pitches that are called strikes by the umpire even if they’re outside the zone?
Is there a reason that Zone% varies so much from BP’s Zone_RT?