We Were Warned
We Were Warned
A happenstance brush with a baseball sage imparted wisdom for a lifetime
The middle of June makes for a strange time to talk about winter, but lately I’ve been thinking about a nugget of wisdom I picked up about 15 years ago during the MLB Winter Meetings.
It was an afternoon in December of 2006. My friend and colleague Pete DeYoung and I headed down from the Padres suite at the Walt Disney World Dolphin Hotel to the bottom levels of the property — past the lobby lizards — where the restaurants were. Mealtimes during the Winter Meetings were always a bit of a free-for-all, with the amount of hungry and hungover mouths significantly outnumbering overall dining capacity.
In other words, you took what you could get.
Pete and I sat down for an unmemorable meal.
We were finishing up lunch when an older gentleman sat at an empty table next to us.
Pete, who is still with the Padres and has been their director of pro scouting for a number of years, quickly introduced himself to our new dining companion, baseball lifer and executive Bill Lajoie. Bill had worked for the Tigers from 1969 through 1990, making his mark in scouting and serving as the GM for the 1984 World Series team.
These Winter Meetings marked his first with the Dodgers as a special assistant, after having spent four years with Theo Epstein and the Red Sox in a similar capacity.
I can still hear the exchange in my head — Pete asking Mr. Lajoie if he had any advice for a couple of guys who were just starting their careers in scouting, and Bill replying, without hesitation:
“Beware of hitters who swing and miss in the zone.”
He expounded upon his belief that young players — amateurs and younger minor leaguers — can develop pitch recognition and plate discipline through instruction and experience. But a young player who couldn’t hit strikes didn’t give a scout much to anchor any projections on.
It was great advice, really, not only in its pithiness but in its portability as well. He left me with wisdom I’ve traveled with ever since then.
From Fort Wayne to Port St. Lucie, from Staten Island to Visalia, I’ve seen plenty of players with strong arms, quick feet, reliable gloves and no ability to hit a pitch in the strike zone. Bill Lajoie’s sagacity plays out every day on high school and college fields and throughout minor league ballparks.
Recently, I started wondering how Major League players were doing in the strike zone. Was Lajoie’s warning that of a bygone era?
During this 16-season span dating back to 2006, contact rate in the strike zone was at its highest in ’06 with 88.5% of swings resulting in some form of contact (including foul balls).
This season, the contact rate has dipped to an all-time low of 83.8%. Just like the strikeout rate has increased annually for a number of years, the rate at which players swing and miss at strikes has also increased.
Among qualified hitters (any hitter who averages 3.1 plate appearance per team game played), Cubs shortstop Javier Baez is at the bottom of the rankings; he is making contact with only 70% of strikes he offers at. His career average coming into the season was about 80%. Baez is striking out more than he has since his 2014 rookie season, but he’s compensating for it with increased power when he does put the ball in play.
In a sense, he is the poster child for the 2021 offensive player. This season, he has walked eight times and struck out a league-leading 90 times. He has a lower batting average, a below average OBP, and an excellent isolated slugging percentage that has kept him in the middle of the lineup of a competitive team.
Other players struggling to make contact with pitches in the strike zone include Michael A. Taylor, Joey Gallo, Randy Arozarena, Matt Chapman, and Rafael Devers.
Taylor is a defensive-first centerfielder who, frankly, has often struggled at the plate. The rest of the list contains players who sell out for power and seem to accept the swing-and-miss as part of their profiles.
Notably, Chapman and Devers both saw their contact numbers plummet in the COVID-impacted 2020 season, and neither has been able to return to pre-pandemic numbers since.
It’s worth keeping an eye on contact rates regularly now in light of MLB’s crackdown on foreign substances being applied to the ball by pitchers. Beware.
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