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March 24, 2005

Crooked Numbers

Whiff or Whiff-Out You

by James Click

If you've been around Baseball Prospectus for more than a few minutes, you've inevitably heard someone talk about strikeouts and strikeout rate. Strikeouts are an odd bird; there's loads of evidence that indicates that, if you had to pick only one metric, strikeout rate--or something encompassing it, like K/BB--is it for pitchers. Nothing's more important. With hitters they seem to be almost completely meaningless, to the point where there's virtually no correlation between team strikeout rate and run scoring. In fact, there's a positive correlation between strikeouts and power, so if strikeouts are great for pitchers, they're not that bad for hitters either. Everybody wins, so maybe things would be great if hitters just struck out every time they got out.

When you talk to people about strikeouts and their place in batting performance, the retort to the idea that they're just another out is that putting the ball in play puts pressure on the defense and increases the chance that runners can advance. If you take two ballplayers with exactly the same statistics except that one strikes out every time and the other gets balls in play every time, the idea is that those two batters produce essentially the exact same offense. Now, jokes about Productive Outs aside, that's not entirely true. It's just that there are no two players who are that extreme--there certainly aren't any teams that extreme--and the effect of putting the ball in play can be lost in the noise.

No matter how long you argue, the fact of the matter is that getting out on a ball in play is different than striking out. Getting back to our two hypothetical players--let's call them Sam Slappy and Winston Whiff (hey, it's late and I'm tired)--we can estimate the costs and benefits of their different approaches at the plate.

The first difference is that Slappy is going to get on base a few more times each season by virtue of reaching on an error, an event that actually counts against on-base percentage. Last year, 1800 batters reached base on an error. There were 94,118 fieldable balls last year--I'm removing hits since our two batters have the exact same stats--so approximately 98.1% of all "outs" are true outs while in 1.9% of the cases the batter reached on an error. There's a slight issue with double plays, but that will come back in a minute.

Assuming that both Slappy and Whiff notch 600 plate appearances and they put up nice league average stats (.260/.330/.440), that leaves right around 400 PA in which Slappy put the ball in play and Whiff did not. Looking at those numbers above, Slappy would reach base nearly eight more times over the course of the season, not an insignificant amount. Counting those ROEs as "hits," Slappy now puts up a .273/.343/.453 line for an MLVr of .0511 instead of .0000, adding up to about seven runs over the course of the season or about 0.0175 runs per strikeout.