The Baseball Analysts: Greenhouse: Hitters by Zones

Jonah, points out the latest work from Jeremy Greenhouse.

Few in MLB can beat a well-located pitch down and away. I wanted to look up those who could, so I broke the plate area down into nine zones, scaling the vertical component of the pitch for the batter’s height. For this analysis, I decided to restrict my sample to only 2009 pitches at which the batter swung.

Batters have the advantage when the pitch is middle-middle, and for the other eight zones, the run value is negative.   

Middle-Middle

Name 	Runs 	Swings
Prince Fielder 	30.7 	249
Mark Teixeira 	29.9 	294
Ryan Braun 	29.6 	281
Adam Dunn 	25.3 	294
Andre Ethier 	25.2 	323
Augie Ojeda    -10.9 	128
Nick Punto     -11.3 	191
Luis Rodriguez -11.8 	129
Ty Wigginton   -12.0 	219
Dioner Navarro -13.1 	174

This is clearly the most telling list in terms of quality of hitter. To be successful swinging the bat, you have to be able to hit the ball pitched down the middle.