The Crazy Descision to Play Ryan Howard Against Lefties

christonabike — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 17:58:30 -0000

Ryan Howard has now had 752 PAs against left handed pitchers. His line?

.221/.304/.440 (OPS: .744) with strikeouts in 41.4% of ABs. In 2008 against LHP he has hit:

.184/.254/.337 (OPS: .591), striking out just over 44% of the time.

It is time to stop playing Ryan Howard against left handers. More evidence and ideas inside.

The most asinine part of playing Ryan Howard against lefties isn't that he plays at all. It's that he's still batting clean up. Ryan Howard has the highest leverage index (a measure of the importance of batting situations) of any player on the Phillies that hasn't seen significant pinch hitting duty.

For reference, here is the career OPS against left handers of every Phillie that typically starts against LHP*:

Jimmy Rollins: .796
Shane Victorino: .823
Chase Utley: .861
Pat Burrell: .949
Jayson Werth: .892
Pedro Feliz: .761
Chris Coste: .933

In case you couldn't tell from the above numbers, Ryan Howard is the worst hitter in the lineup against LHP. This year, when Ryan Howard has faced lefites, he's been worse than Carlos Ruiz.

Now, admittedly the Phillies don't have anyone else they can play at 1st that would hit better than Howard against lefties. If only there was someone available for the major league minimum...

Don't like Richie Sexson? The minors are packed with RH 1B that can only hit lefties. In fact, the Phillies already have one. HIs name is Jon Knott, he's 28 years old and has never seen significant playing time in the majors. Oh, and he's been crushing LHP at AAA to the tune of a 1.103 OPS (83 ABs) and is at .902 for his career.

If the Phillies want to be competitive this year or in the future, they need to find a solution for Ryan Howard's ineptitude against LHP.

*Bonus challenge: Can you construct a lineup better against LHP than the one the Phillies use? I'm prett sure a randomly generated line up would be better.

Swinging at the First Pitch

christonabike — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 21:57:53 -0000

Jimmy Rollins is frequently maligned for hacking at the first pitch of his at bats. In fact, his Baseball Reference page even states that "[he] is often criticized for swinging at the first pitch, which normally leads to him flying out or grounding out."

However, recently, in the post "A Stroll Through Spring Stats", dajafi decided to look up the numbers. In the last 3 years, Rollins has put the first pitch into play 299 times with a line of:

.338/.341/.535

At first glance, these numbers seem pretty impressive. He certainly does significantly better than he has hit cumulatively over the last 3 years:

.285/.340/.455

So, should Rollins be swinging at more first pitches? Already, hitting the first pitch 299 seems like an awfully high percentage of times to put the ball into play on the first pitch. It doesn't even count swings and misses! To answer this question, let's compare Rollins to the rest of the league and the Phillies.

Unfortunately, I was unable to find the league average numbers for swinging at the first pitch. Fortunately, I am capable enough at hacking together some Perl code and like a good challenge. I parsed the three year splits on ESPN.com and tallied the stats of every player with 20 ABs or more on a 0-0 count*. The results:

Players analyzed: 507
Total ABs: 55218
AVG: 0.343
OBP: 0.349
SLG: 0.557

These numbers are far better than the league average line of .260/.330/.420. I believe the reason batters have such high averages when hitting the first pitch are twofold:

It is impossible to strike out on the first pitch, so swings and misses are excluded from these stats.

Batters are likely to only swing at the first pitch if it's a pitch they are expecting or "sitting on."

Despite being an above average hitter, Rollins is below the league average for swinging at the first pitch. While this analysis is somewhat rudimentary, it leads me to believe that the critics are right - Rollins should be swinging at fewer first pitches, not more. Fortunately, he has been. Here are Rollins' percentages at swinging at the first pitch over the last 3 years:

2004 - 18.5%
2005 - 15.8%
2006 - 10.1%

So far, in spring training, Rollins has shown some pretty impressive patience at the plate. Let's hope that trend continues. For reference, here are the rest of the Phillies lines with 75+ ABs swinging at the first pitch over 2004-2006:

Wes Helms 90 ABs .356/.378/.544
Rod Barajas 109 ABs .367/.364/.688
Pat Burrell 186 ABs .403/.401/.737
Jimmy Rollins 299 ABs .338/.341/.535
Aaron Rowand 214 ABs .397/.414/.715
Chase Utley 141 ABs .390/.424/.702
Ryan Howard 124 ABs .427/.430/1.000

Finally, if anyone is interested, I'll gladly send the code for parsing ESPN's splits. If a lot of people are interested, I'll even do a post on it.

*ESPN.com stats pages are of the form http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/players/splits?statsId=XXXX&type=batting3 where XXXX is a four digit number. I parsed the numbers 5000-8000. I don't believe there are active players outside of this range. Note that the player IDs shift from page to page and a player ID on a player's main page is not his number on his 3 year splits page. However, 507 players seems like it would be an accurate number of players to have accrued 20+ ABs with a 0-0 count (e.g. even Coste didn't have this many last year).

SB Nation User Blog: christonabike

The Crazy Descision to Play Ryan Howard Against Lefties

Swinging at the First Pitch