Interesting article. Something is definitely wrong when you're 10th in all the majors in drawing walks, but you're tied for second to last in all the majors in OBP.

I guess the simple, easiest answer to that one is the team just can't hit for sh*t.

Of course in 2007 they had a 1.115 OPS with 3-1 counts but I guess bringing up more than one year of data would make the article look bad since it has no legs to stand on.

The Twins were a lucky team that is going to really struggle to score runs next year unless they upgrade the offense, the A's were the opposite side of the spectrum. This same thing happens every single year.

It may be that only very wild pitchers get to 3-1 on very aggressive hitters and those don't walk them have to groove the pitch. More patient hitters will have the above type of 3-1 situations with wild pitchers AND also have situations with pitchers showing better control.

So the first problem is the situations are not the same - ie. there is different selection for pitcher quality.

The second and probably larger problem is that high OBP players can sustain lower batting averages and still have a job. So you have to do some adjustment for this too.

I'm not saying that his conclusion is incorrect. It does make sense that when pitchers have less latitude to choose their pitch and location when behind the count that the hitter that has a large swing zone will be less disadvantaged and thus more aggressive hitting is a better strategy in these situations.

However, his numbers don't justify this conclusion.

Joe Mauer and Justin Morneau, for instance, both had below average discipline factors – an accusation that doesn’t really fit.

What's a "discipline factor?" And how do two guys with above average BB rates and excellent K rates come out below average in terms of discipline?

What's a "discipline factor?"

Another quality concept brought to you by Dugout Central.

Shaun in the articles comments there has it right. What Ehrke is saying *could* be right, but we need to know if Oakland swung at fewer 3-1 pitches. Or the PA ended on that pitch.

What's a "discipline factor?"

As defined by Dugout Central, OBP - BA.

It's part of the never-ending quest to numerically capture "plate discipline." I find the end result (like this one) usually ends up rewarding guys who swing and miss a lot and punishing guys who don't.

I like to think of plate discipline as the guys who swing at strikes and take balls.

I like to think of plate discipline as the guys who swing at strikes and take balls.

I tend to think of it as the guys who swing at the pitches that they know they can hit and take the ones that they know they can't. If a guy can drive a pitch that is not in the strike zone, he should be swinging at it.

-- MWE

If a guy can drive a pitch that is not in the strike zone, he should be swinging at it.

Right. If Vlad thinks he can hit a ball in the dirt mile, let him swing at it. If Cust doesn't think he can drive a ball on the outer half the plate, let him take it.

There are limits, of course, but no one approach works for everybody.

Right. If Vlad thinks he can hit a ball in the dirt mile, let him swing at it. If Cust doesn't think he can drive a ball on the outer half the plate, let him take it.

So Vlad is a disciplined hitter. I'm not sure I'd go that far. (Not that I'd try to change his style, just that I wouldn't call him disciplined).

I think Mike's definition is probably pretty close. If a guy is swinging at pitches he CAN drive, rather than ones he thinks he can drive, then that's a disciplined hitter even if his strike zone may differ somewhat from the book zone.

Dan Fox did some work on a topic like this. Discussion.

The Twins were a lucky team that is going to really struggle to score runs next year unless they upgrade the offense, the A's were the opposite side of the spectrum.

Careful there ... with their lineup as it stands, the A's will struggle mightily to score runs next year. They probably did have some bad luck this year but they are a poor offensive team and have been for a while.

As defined by Dugout Central, OBP - BA.

Only in certain counts? Because Mauer and Morneau are both better than league average overall in that "metric."

Careful there ... with their lineup as it stands, the A's will struggle mightily to score runs next year. They probably did have some bad luck this year but they are a poor offensive team and have been for a while.

I won't dispute the projection for next year, but the offense hasn't exactly been poor for awhile. They had a 102 OPS+ in 2007, and they'd been pretty much league average over the 4 years preceding their awful showing in 2008.

Only in certain counts? Because Mauer and Morneau are both better than league average overall in that "metric."

I have no idea. It looks like he performs different discipline factors per count.

If a guy is swinging at pitches he CAN drive, rather than ones he thinks he can drive, then that's a disciplined hitter even if his strike zone may differ somewhat from the book zone.

But even then, it's more complicated. Vlad CAN hit a home run on a ball that's at his shoelaces, but what if he can only hit it that hard 1 out of 25 times? The other 24 times he either fouls it off, misses, or grounds out weakly. Wouldn't it be better to let it go and go after the next pitch?

Careful there ... with their lineup as it stands, the A's will struggle mightily to score runs next year. They probably did have some bad luck this year but they are a poor offensive team and have been for a while.

Agreed. They are quite clearly one of the worst offenses in all of baseball as it stands right now. To say that they were "unlucky" is a bit silly.

I'm going to make a prediction here and now: starting next season you're going to see the A's do a radical, 180 degree philosophical turn on offense from the "Moneyball" philosophy. They're going to be far more aggressive both at the plate and on the basepaths than they've been in years.

Geren already hinted at this at the end of the season, and I think he can get away with it being such a close personal friend of Beane's. I suspect he knows that when you can't hit, you have no choice but to take some chances in order to score runs.

After reading the full article it seems like this guy's point can be summed up as "swing at good pitches." Ultimately the differences he mentions in there are largely due to the fact that the A's just don't have many good hitters. I would say that the low batting avg/slugging pct. when swinging on 3-1 is indicative that when they were aggressive they weren't particularly adept at identifying hittable pitches and being MORE aggressive on 2-1 wasn't going to improve that situation.

I'm going to make a prediction here and now: starting next season you're going to see the A's do a radical, 180 degree philosophical turn on offense from the "Moneyball" philosophy. They're going to be far more aggressive both at the plate and on the basepaths than they've been in years.

I don't think that you're trashing the concept of taking walks in the way that most people who refer to a "Moneyball philosophy" do. Still, the philosophy was actually about searching for and exploiting undervalued attributes in players. At the time that the book was written, on-base percentage was undervalued, so the A's used it heavily in searching for guys who could help them. You may be right in saying that the A's will start to be aggressive at bat and on the bases, but a 180-degree turn from the Moneyball philosophy would be to scour the market for guys who are overvalued, and I can't imagine that any team would knowingly do that.

I'm going to make a prediction here and now: starting next season you're going to see the A's do a radical, 180 degree philosophical turn on offense from the "Moneyball" philosophy. They're going to be far more aggressive both at the plate and on the basepaths than they've been in years.

Probably. They have a very young lineup, and the personnel fits a different style. I assume Carlos Gonzalez will be a fulltime starter next year, and he's never seen a pitch he didn't want to swing at. There will probably be fewer AB for someone like Hannahan, who takes a lot of pitches but can't hit. He's not very good, and not that young, so the A's will likely replace him.

It interests me as plate discipline continues to be stressed and stressed how that's going to affect the game in 5-10 years as kids who've been brought up on that philosophy start to filter their way to the Majors. I mean it was only 5 years ago that any semblance of the mainstream even cared about OBP, now that most everyone with a fully functioning brain recognizes its importance and now those same people are teaching little leaguers/high schoolers all the way on up, what's the effect going to be?

I wouldn't be shocked if pitchers/pitching coaches began to stress the idea of taking something off on the first pitch to make sure they get ahead in the count. Sort of a modification of the old Cristy Mathewson theory of keeping something in reserve. If you're facing a Jack Cust and you know; a: he's a pretty good bet to take the first pitch and b: if he gets ahead he can hurt you but behind in the count he's exploitable then people will want to get ahead (not that they don't already of course).

What would be interesting if this came to pass is how hitters would adapt. Part of Kevin Youkilis' breakout this year was that he became a bit more aggressive putting the first or second pitch into play 21% of the time as opposed to 17% of the time with an OPS of over 1.200 on those pitches (including 12 of his 27 homers in just 132 AB). I wonder if pitchers were trying this sort of approach with him given his reputation and he took advantage.

Oh I didn't mean the A's would score a ton of runs, they just were unlucky with runners on. The fact that his numbers are only from 2008 and are exactly the opposite of what happened in 2007 with the same team philosophy at play pretty much debunks the entire article. The sample size on these things on a team basis are too small to be meaningful over one season and every year some teams do poorly and some do well and rarely is it a sign of their approach. It is just natural variance.

I wouldn't be shocked if pitchers/pitching coaches began to stress the idea of taking something off on the first pitch to make sure they get ahead in the count.

That's already a big part of the Twins' organizational pitching philosophy. You look at a Radke, a Slowey, at the historically low walk rate put up by Silva in his good year with them, at the type of guys they draft and promote and you see a range of K rates but most of the walk rates are pretty low. If you put a good D out there and throw strikes, your opponents are going to be limited to "good" runs for the most part (fewer walks means fewer baserunners so fewer errors means unearned are lower than usual.) How far this can be extended without a good k rate will be interesting to explore, but it looks good on paper and MN has had good results when they actually field well.

On the Mauer/Morneau/Gibson notion:

While it's true that Mauer probably has enough athletic ability that he could shift to 3B or the OF without much incident, this is not true of Cs as a class. While it's popular to try Cs at 3B, this doesn't have a great success rate -- and of course many Cs don't hit well enough to hold 3B anyway. So I really don't think that's a good way to think of the positional value of the C.

As a platonic ideal, I suppose I'd separate player value into hitting value not positionally adjusted, defensive value relative to position and the defensive value difference across positions. The problem is I don't think there really is a good way to measure that third thing. Certainly the easiest way to approximate it is to look at the difference in average offensive production among the positions.

One concern I have with that is handedness -- a reasonable chunk of the offensive advantage of 1B/OF/DH, especially relative to 2B/3B, is that lefties can play those positions (and most lefty throwers are lefty batters and vice versa). That is, the "theory" is that you need a scrawny fast kid to handle SS and you can't expect scrawny guys to hit well. But Barry Bonds or Kenny Lofton or whoever might well have had the talent to play SS, they just throw with the wrong hand. So some of that offensive difference isn't so much about different body type requirements of the positions but is that those positions are drawing from a smaller pool of talent. (Obviously there's nothing a stathead should do about that in terms of assigning "value", it's just part of the game, but I think it does mean we need to rethink the "theory" somewhat.)

I know Tango has tried to estimate the positional defensive difference but I don't think what he did really worked -- not that I paid much attention to the detail. But my memory is he did things like look at SS who moved to LF and see how well they did (generally well). But that's at best half the picture I think. OF and 1B are "easy" to play; SS is not. Any ML SS can probably be at least an average LF but can probably never be better than maybe +20; Manny Ramirez at SS would be about -120; Greg Luzinski at SS would get you a call from the Commissioner's office by the 2nd inning.

That's probably doubly true of C -- they are simply a different breed. The notion of Ryan Howard's bat carrying a move behind the plate is even more absurd than the idea of moving Bengie Molina to CF. :-)