Very interesting article. I really like Dan's blog.

Dan, from the comments:

I also created another metric I didn't publish called Square which is the percentage of pitches in the zone that were swung at and made contact with. The average is 87.1% and there are several players at 100% including Chone Figgins, Placido Polanco, Derek Jeter, and Esteban German. On the flip side Russell Branyan is 61.2%, Rob Bowen 65.4% and Jack Cust 69.7%.

Guess how often Buddy Bell plays Esteban German? 17 games at second base, 17 games at third base, 2 games at shortstop, 3 games at left field.

German: .252/.355/.374 (a far shout from his .326/.422/.459 line from last year, I know)

2B: Grudzielanek: .263/.311/.392
3B: Gordon: .187/.296/.306
LF: Brown: .218/.275/.306
LF: Costa: .186/.200/.233
LF: Butler: .243/.256/.297

He's superior to every one of those hitters. Now, Grudz has great defense, and Gordon's the future. But why doesn't German start everyday in LF and move to 2B or 3B to spell Grudz/Gordon every now and then? Joey Gathright's defense is great in left, don't get me wrong, but it's left field for crying out loud.

Is Jeff Francouer eyeless

he has less than 0.1 of an eye

no wonder he can't see the pitches

Related to this, I've seen several people talk about % of pitches that a player swings and misses at. Where can I find those numbers? I've looked all over for them, but I don't really know what they would be called so my search may have been ineffectual. I would really like to see if certain players (cough*Rickie Weeks*cough) actually swing and miss as much as it seems that they do.

I don't know where they would be off the top of my head, but I think a search for "swinging strike percentage" or some such thing would be of most help.

Baseball Reference has this starting from the 80s. Just click on the red text besides Pitch Data Summary.

Killer graph.
I would've loved to see this for Hee Seop Choi's Dodgers career. I liked the guy, but he could get awfully passive at the plate, content to just stand there and watch the pretty white orbs fly by. He'd be way in that upper-left quadrant.

Sweet, thank you so much Juan. I guess I always just skimmed over that because it wasn't obvious what it was. Now I just have to figure out what all the abbreviations mean. ;)

I'd have to echo the comments on the page about Eye. It seems counterintuitive to give players a high Eye score if they're unwilling to swing at pitches that are in the strike zone. Of course, some players won't swing because they know they can't hit it anyway. Others won't swing because they don't recognize it as a strike. But at the very least, changing the value of Eye to "1 - (current) Eye" might be more readily understood within the context of your other stat titles.

Otherwise this is great stuff.

That's a pretty odd collection down in the lower left and not exactly the game's top hitters -- not sure that's the "sweet spot" as Dan labels it. Thome's down there and he's a great hitter and doing quite well this season. Upton somehow is hitting great despite striking out 35% of the time. But, while I can't read all the names, others in that quadrant are Luis Gonzalez, Tadahito Iguchi (decent hitter but not having a great season), Travis Buck, Kenny Lofton, Willie Harris (I think) ... could be Brendan Harris, Termell Sledge, Jose Cruz Jr (I think), Richie Sexson, Josh Bard (I think) and one guy I can't make out.

As near as I can tell, a "good" pitch is defined as a strike. Some strikes are very hard to hit of course and so I'm not sure these numbers are going to be much help in identifying "good" and "bad" hitters. At least, I think I'd take the upper left quadrant over the lower left quadrant this season and, if this is consistent over time, I'd definitely take them on a career basis. Hitters up there include Frank Thomas, Troy Glaus, Nick Swisher, Bobby Abreu, Brian Giles, Mark Teixeira.

Thanks everybody. A couple points:

1. I totally agree about the "Eye" metric. It should be inverted.

2. Also since I was looking at the entire strike zone, the eye metric should also probably shave off the outer few inches to take into consideration the point that Walt makes. While I exclude 3-0 counts when computing Eye should I perhaps do the same for 2-0 or 3-1??

3. When I drew the quadrants they were based on averages and for the Eye metric perhaps the average is not where you want to set it. Also this looked at players with 200 or more pitches while my BP piece had the same graph with 100 or more. In the 100 or more graph we had Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada (against right-handed pitchers), Barry Bonds, David Ortiz, Magglio Ordonez, and Chipper Jones as in that lower-left quadrant as well prompting to me to call it the "sweet spot". Remember that the data I have only is for 9 parks with a heavy emphasis on the AL West and so players are not evenly represented.