The Hitters Who Spent The Most Time At The Plate In 2011 - Beyond the Box Score

Earlier this week, Jeff Sullivan of Baseball Nation wrote about FanGraphs’ new Batter Pace statistic, based on PITCHf/x timestamps. Pace, in this context, is just the measurement of the average time that elapses between two pitches.

Sullivan’s post got me wondering: which hitters were at the plate for the longest cumulative time in 2011? On the one hand, players who hit at the top of the order would accrue more PAs, and thus more time at the plate. On the other hand, those top-of-the-lineup hitters were also the ones who tended to have the fastest paces.

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As you can see, some hitters with a similar number of trips to the plate nonetheless had huge differences in total time at bat. In the most extreme case, Carlos Pena was at bat for nearly five and a half more hours than Erick Aybar. Over a full season, differences of two to three hours are fairly common.