On Patience

One of the most infuriating things for me as a fan is to see Orioles batters take bad swings at pitches early in the count. It's tremendously frustrating to see a rally killed by bad decisions and a lack of plate discipline. That feeling is amplified when I see Orioles starters racking up pitch counts and leaving games early because the opposing batters are willing to work counts.

It appears this frustration is not unique to me. Camden Depot received an email from a reader detailing Statcast rankings for some of baseball's most infuriating events: first pitch swings, outs made on the first pitch, taking third strikes in unfavorable counts, etc. While I've covered some of these frustrations in the past, I think it's worth airing them out frequently. Each time I consider my own feelings toward the aggressive, free-swinging style of play that the Orioles batters employ, I learn something new and frequently come away from it with a (begrudging) acceptance that perhaps things are for the best.

Swinging at the First Pitch

One of the my pet peeves is swinging at the very first pitch of the at-bat. To me, it feels very much like trading significant long-term benefits (favorable counts, a tired starter, early access to relief pitchers, better timing, seeing a whole pitch arsenal, I could go on) for immediate, but potentially smaller, short-term benefits (most first pitches are fastballs and fastballs are easy to hit).

In 2016, 38% of first pitches of at-bats were fastballs. This is pretty standard; pitchers looking to get a quick strike are likely to lean on the pitch that they can throw straight rather than hope for a swinging strike against an off-speed pitch. Most hitters prefer fastballs, since they move less than off-speed pitches, so it makes sense that aggressive batters would want to jump on straight, hard pitches regardless of when they show up, first pitch or not. The top five batters in 2016 that jumped on the first pitch, not filtered for outcome are:

1. Adam Jones
2. Corey Seager
3. George Springer
4. Yasmany Tomas
5. Freddie Freeman

Batting average king Jose Altuve ranked sixth, while Jonathan Schoop and Chris Davis ranked among the league leaders as well. Clearly, excellent hitters take advantage of the first pitch frequently. It helps to make contact with the first pitch, but the batting leaders in whiffing on the first pitch are very similar to the leaders in making an attempt at all. Adam Jones, for as much as I make of his proclivity to swing early and often, ranked 12th in whiffing on the first pitch, well below the other names on the above list.

As frustrating as swinging at the first pitch is when it doesn't work, it seems to be a perfectly reasonable strategy for a batter. It's impossible to know whether another, better pitch will come up later in the at-bat, and frankly, how much difference is there between a hit now and a hit against a "better pitch" later? Unless the pitch later can be swung at with a corked bat, the likelihood that it will yield significantly better results is low, if it yields any results at all.

Further, for accomplished batters who have made their entire career on aggressiveness, asking them to suddenly change their entire approach at the plate - the one that got them to the Majors in the first place - could do more to derail their rhythm than taking a few pitches helps.

Swinging at Straight Up Garbage that Everyone Knows is Coming

Wow, sorry for the language, but this topic gets me so heated. If I pitched to Adam Jones, I wouldn't throw him anything but pitches away and in the dirt. To my eyes, he swings at all of them. I haven't watched every other batter as much as I've watched Jones, but I would venture to guess that he swings at these nearly unhittable pitches far more frequently than others.

Among batters who have seen at least 400 pitches in 2016 low and to the right of the catcher, outside the strike zone, that would be close to correct. The following batters are most likely to swing at these pitches:

1. Salvador Perez (R)
2. Robinson Cano (L)
3. Jose Abreu (R)
4. Paulo Orlando (R)
5. Chris Davis (L)
6. Adam Jones (R)

I added each batter's handedness because pitches in this area are low and away to righties and low and inside to lefties. Depending on swing type and preferences, these might be easier to hit for lefties.

I don't want this to be an Adam Jones hit piece; it's not supposed to be at all. So I'll point out that Chris Davis, when he swings at pitches very low and very inside, had a 0.089 batting average in 2016. You would hope that someone swinging at those pitches often would be able to hit them with some frequency, but Davis is ice cold when he hacks at those pitches.

While I have not yet explored all of my frustrations with aggressive batters (surely I will soon), this article has done well to remind me that aggression can be good, but discernment is required. I hope it has done the same for you. If not... well, everyone's tune changes when the Orioles' free swingers connect for huge home runs.

Chris Davis Should Swing More

One of the longstanding criticisms about the Orioles offense is their penchant to avoid walks like the plague. Since 2012, the Orioles rank 23rd in baseball in OBP, despite the fact that they are 6th in runs scored. The biggest reason? The team has hit far and away the most home runs in baseball during that time frame. One of the biggest reasons for that? Chris Davis, who leads all of baseball with 197 homers during that time.

Of course, Davis has been the best OBP guy on the team, posting a .340 OBP since 2012, a mark surpassed only by Nick Markakis (in fewer PA, naturally).  Even in what has to be considered a down season in 2016, Davis still finished second on the team with a .332 OBP, and in general runs an OBP that is far better than his batting average, making him almost like a unicorn on this particular team.

This should be great! The O's need OBP guys, and Davis is one of the most patient hitters on the team. It's likely one of the reasons that he may be the best leadoff option on the team.  The problem, however, is that the more selective Davis has been in his career, the less success he has seen overall. Davis' walk rate has increased every single season since 2012, with his 13.2% in 2016 representing a career high, but produced his two worst offensive seasons in 2014 and 2016. This is a puzzle, as in general we'd expect high walk rates to correlate with increased offensive success.

One of the factors that may be able to explain this somewhat odd occurrence is to look at how often Davis actually swings the bat, since you can't hit homers and produce big offensive numbers unless you hit the ball.  Davis swung at his lowest rate ever last season, swinging at just 42.7% of pitches. His career mark is 49.4%, and in his breakout 2013 season he swung at over 50% of the pitches he saw. To his credit, Davis swung at the fewest pitches outside of the strike zone in his career last season, but the flip side of that is he swung at the fewest percentage of pitches in the zone as well. In fact, the decline in this metric was so precipitous that it almost leads me to question whether his hand injury was far more severe than was reported. Unless his eyesight also declined last season, there is little other reason for why he went from swinging at 68% of strikes in 2015 to just under 60% in 2016.

This also brings up the issue of strikeouts, which is something that any discussion of Davis simply can't avoid. That Davis strikes out a lot is not news. What is interesting, however, is how he strikes out. Davis has, by far, the most called third strikes in baseball since 2012 with 279, and had 79 called third strikes in 2016, which is also the most by far for any player in any season since 2009.  Some of that is a simply function of the sheer volume of strikeouts he racks up, but looking a bit deeper into the yearly fluctuations of called K's is particularly interesting. Below is a table of Davis' called strikeout percentage, his Weighted Runs Created (WRC+) and his Weighted On Base Average (wOBA) by year.

Year	Called K%	WRC+	wOBA
2012	24	121	0.352
2013	24	168	0.421
2014	32	94	0.308
2015	27	148	0.390
2016	36	111	0.340

In years when Davis takes fewer called third strikes, he is at worst an above average hitter and at best one of the game's elites. In years where he takes a higher number of called third strikes, however, he is below average to slightly above.

Now, this may be sample size noise and there are likely other factors that contribute to Davis' offensive inconsistency, but it seems fairly clear that the less aggressive Davis is the less successful he is offensively. A strikeout is an out regardless, but a called third strike is probably the least productive out simply because there is no possibility of anything good happening. In Davis' case, it's doubly unproductive because he hits the ball extremely hard. He consistently ranks in the upper echelon of hard hit balls and obviously produces massive power when he connects.  

It seems odd to say that a player should be less selective, and even more so when that player is on the Baltimore Orioles. In Davis' case, however, taking fewer pitches and being more aggressive at the plate certainly seems to correlate with better offensive production.  So, I'd suggest something I never thought I'd have to to suggest to an Oriole: swing the bat!

Why Swinging More Won't Help Chris Davis

Previously, I showed how Chris Davis propensity to strike out decreases his overall offensive production despite a decent walk rate. I made two questionable assumptions in that article. I assumed that players will hit the same proportion of pitches in the strike zone regardless of swing rate. I also assumed that production per pitch put into play would remain constant regardless of swing rate. These assumptions seem to be counterintuitive. Batters that swing less frequently are expected to swing at only the best pitches. It makes sense to take a closer look to see how batters perform.

In order to measure this, I used a pitchf/x dataset with data from 2013, 2014 and 2015 and determined all batters that faced 1,000 pitches or more in a given season. For each batter, I determined their monthly performance in a given season for all months from April to September while discarding players that didn’t play in each month from the dataset. Then, I sorted each player’s monthly performance in a season by swing rate. Finally, I grouped the players by that ranking, so that the month when a player had his lowest swing rate in a season was ranked 1 and the month with their highest swing rate was ranked 6.

For example, look at Adam Jones in 2013. He had his lowest swing rate in April, so that month was ranked “1”. His next lowest swing rate was in July, and therefore that month was ranked “2”. The next lowest was September, so that month was ranked “3” and etc. His monthly performance in a given year is placed in a different category based on how his swing rate in that month compares to his swing rate in other months.

For Chris Davis, I looked solely at 2013 and 2015 to avoid being biased by poor performance in 2014 and ranked his performance by month into two groups based on swing rate with six months in a low swing group and six months in a high swing group. This methodology allows one to compare players to themselves and measure the impact that reducing or increasing swing rate has on the results.

This first chart shows there’s considerable variation in a batters’ swing rate over a given year as measured in units of months. Every batter is in each group once and only once, but Swing% goes from 42.77% in the group where batters swing least frequently to 51.43% in the group where batters swing most frequently. As swing rate decreases, the chance of a called ball increases while the chance of a strike slightly decreases. The ratio of called balls to called strikes remains constant. As swing rate decreases, called ball rate increases and strike rate stays static.

This second chart shows the frequency of where pitchers throw the ball and when batters swing and put the ball into play. As swing rate goes down, batters swing less at pitches in all areas of the strike zone. Batters do put a larger proportion of pitches in the strike zone into play as swing rate decreases but the absolute impact is minimal. Batters put few pitches out of the strike zone into play regardless of swing rate and therefore it’s going to have only a small impact on actual production. Players that swing less will put a higher proportion of pitches in the strike zone into play than pitches outside of the strike zone, but the impact is minimal in absolute terms.

This third chart shows production based on grouping. As swing rate decreases, walk rate increases while strikeout rate remains constant leading to large increases in “wOBA Not In Play”.  This makes sense because the called ball rate is increasing considerably while in play rate is decreasing as swing rate goes down resulting in more walks. Meanwhile, strike/foul rate decreasing suggests there should be fewer strikeouts while in play rate decreasing, suggests there should be more strikeouts. It would seem these two factors cancel each other out.

Also note how the increase in both BB% and “wOBA Not In Play” is reasonably linear and is split reasonably evenly among all categories. This is what one would expect to see if swing rate has an impact on wOBA Not in Play. It should come as no surprise that there’s a moderate correlation of -.5 between Swing% and wOBA Not in Play.

There’s only a small increase in wOBA in play. It’s constant when pitches aren’t thrown in the strike zone and there is only a slight change when pitches are thrown in the strike zone. These differences aren’t particularly linear or split evenly among all categories. It should come as no surprise that even the correlation between Swing% and wOBA In Play for strikes is .03. In all likelihood, the difference in wOBA in play between these groups is probably nothing more than luck. This indicates that production of pitches put into play is largely independent of swing rate.

One might think the two assumptions made above could have huge implications, but it turns out that one has a minimal effect and the other has no effect.

Chris Davis’ stats tell a similar but unique story. He has a well above average called ball/called strike ratio regardless of whether he’s being aggressive or not. But his contact tool is so poor that being aggressive does little to help him put pitches into play. The Hardball Times noted that Chris Davis' "True Contact" rate is one of the worst in the majors (462 out of 498). In fact, his contact tool can be described by this:

Despite a 4% increase in swing rate between his most aggressive months and most selective months, he only had a .27% increase in in play rate. This suggests that he only put 6.8% of these extra pitches into play, which is less than half of his base rate.

This next chart shows that pitchers are only throwing roughly 34-35% of pitches to him in the strike zone compared to a standard of 38-40%. He does do a good job swinging at strikes rather than balls suggesting that he has an above-average eye.

But if pitchers are going to give him relatively few pitches to hit, then he needs to swing at relatively few pitches. Otherwise, his aggression just results in a lot of fouled pitches, swinging strikes and ultimately strike outs. He should probably be swinging closer to 37% of the time instead of 47%. This would likely result in more walks, fewer strikeouts and being thrown a larger proportion of strikes.

This third chart shows his actual results. He swings so frequently and has such a poor contact tool that a reduction in swinging resulted in fewer strikeouts and more walks. While players typically want to put pitches into play, an increase of BB% by 3.25 and a decrease of K% by 2.14 is an extremely favorable trade for every batter that will ever play baseball.

The data indicate that he has better results when putting pitches into play when he swings often. This is counter to the results in the original data set and could be a reason for him to swing frequently. Alternatively, it could be a function of small sample size as he only put roughly 360 pitches into play total in both sets of six months.

Swinging more often isn’t likely to help him improve by much. Suppose we go back into time and make the following change. For each at bat that he doesn’t put the ball into play, we decide that he will swing at every pitch in the strike zone that he didn’t actually swing at in real life. Given his inability to make contact, such a change would only have a limited impact on his overall production. His walk rate would drop from about 10% to 9%, his strikeout rate would drop from roughly 31% to 25% and his wOBA would increase by only 6%. This shows that a higher swing rate, even presuming it would occur in only potentially beneficial situations, would have minimal impact on his production.

The above analysis shows that production per pitch put into play is largely independent of swing rate for the average batter. It is possible that hitters that swing at an extremely high or low percent of pitches do better or worse than the average. The assumption that I made in my article that Adam Jones would have a constant wOBA In Play regardless of swing rate was close enough to accurate.

This analysis also illustrates how poor Chris Davis is at making contact. Such a weakness makes it unlikely that he’ll ever be able to make average levels of contact even if he swings at extremely high levels. His aggressiveness pretty much solely results in more swinging strikes and fouls rather than pitches put into play. Therefore, he should consider swinging less frequently in order to increase his walk rate and likely decrease his strikeout rates. The average player may do better when they put the ball into play rather than when they don’t, but contact simply isn’t in Chris Davis’ toolbox. Players with extreme power but limited plate discipline would seem to be more successful with an extremely selective approach. And, like Mr. Burns, at Camden Depot we like to play the percentages.

Adam Jones Has Better Plate Discipline Than Chris Davis

The Orioles recently re-signed Chris Davis to a seven-year, $161 million contract. As Jon wrote, Davis brings to the immediate a strong bat with a heavy right-handed favored split.  It’s pretty simple, people like Chris Davis because he has elite power and can absolutely crush pitches. Meanwhile, CBS Sports feels that he still strikes out a lot, but made small strides with his plate discipline last season.  The writer argues that Davis’s BB/K ratio of .4 may not be ideal but isn’t terrible either. People generally seem to agree that Chris Davis may strike out a lot but his walk rate does offset it to some extent.

On the other hand, it is pretty well accepted that Adam Jones has bad plate discipline. Bucs Dugout asserts that Adam Jones swings at pretty much everything. Peter Gammons claims that his major problem is that he swings too often in favorable counts. Camden Chat says that it’s indisputable that he strikes out too much and walks too little.

In this article, I intend to show that Chris Davis has significantly worse plate discipline than Adam Jones, despite the fact that Davis has a BB/K of roughly .4 while Jones has a BB/K of roughly .2 over the past three years.  Here, let me explain.

Recently, I wrote a post breaking wOBA into three component parts using data from ESPN Stats and Information. I measured a player’s production when he hits a pitch in the strike zone, when he hits a pitch that isn’t in the strike zone, and when he doesn’t make contact at all. Using this method measures each player’s production in these three areas as shown in the chart below.

Chris Davis averages a wOBA of .187 on balls not put into play compared to Adam Jones who averages a .136 on balls not put into play from 2013-2015. This makes sense as Chris Davis does walk more often than Adam Jones and would seem to support the argument that Davis has better plate discipline. However, such an analysis ignores one crucial thing. It ignores the fact that Adam Jones failed to put the ball into play 24% of the time while Chris Davis failed to do so 44% of the time.

This is relevant due to a point that I made in my previous post. For the average batter, a strikeout is more damaging than a walk is beneficial. Batters only have a .219 wOBA on average when failing to put the ball into play and nearly all do better when they put the ball into play than when they fail to do so. The general rule of thumb is that it takes roughly 11 walks to offset 9 strikeouts because batters average a .369 wOBA when putting the ball into play.

In order to compare Adam Jones’ plate discipline to Chris Davis, it is necessary to take into account the fact that Chris Davis doesn’t put the ball into play as often.  Just comparing .187 to .136 fails to take quantity into account.

The way to take into account both quality and quantity requires some high school algebra. It requires comparing how Adam Jones actually performed to how he’d perform if he put a pitch into play only in 56% of PAs and failed to do so in the other 44% but had the same wOBA when not putting the same ball into play as Chris Davis. In other words, this is equivalent of determining which equation is greater:

.76 * wOBA Jones InPlay + .24 *wOBA Jones NotInPlay  or
.56 * wOBA Jones InPlay  + .44 *wOBA CD NotInPlay.
Which simplifies to:
.2 * wOBA AJ InPlay + .24 wOBA AJ NotInPlay vs .44 * CD wOBA NotInPlay

In other words, it’s necessary to compare how Chris Davis performs during the 44% of times when he fails to put the ball into contact to how Adam Jones performs during the 24% of times he fails to put the ball into contact AND another 20% of how he performs when he does put the ball into contact. This results in the following.

When one takes both quantity and quality into account, it becomes apparent that a player able to hit the ball as successfully as Adam Jones would rather have his walk and strikeout numbers rather than having Chris Davis’s. Even though Chris Davis has a better BB/K and a wOBA Not in Play than Adam Jones, the fact that he puts so many fewer balls into play hurts him.

I make two assumptions for this analysis. I assume that Adam Jones will hit the same proportion of pitches in the strike zone or not in the strike zone if he makes contact less frequently and that his production when he does make contact won’t increase if he swings less frequently. Preliminary research suggests that these assumptions are slightly inaccurate. He should be expected to make slightly better contact if he swings less frequently.

The wOBA All Balls Field projects how Adam Jones would perform if the extra in play contact was solely against pitches out of the strike zone and thus balances out both of the assumptions in the paragraph below. Even still, one would rather have Adam Jones’ numbers than Chris Davis’s strikeout and walk numbers. In reality, as shown in the chart above, Chris Davis’s plate discipline is about as good as Jonathan Schoop’s and only slightly better than Jimmy Paredes.

This poor plate discipline shows why it’s so hard for Chris Davis to be successful.  My metric measuring plate discipline suggests that he’s typically in the bottom 2% in this regard (5th percentile in 2014). He’s able to thrive because in 2013 and 2015, he was in the 99th percentile of wOBA for pitches hit into play. He was elite in those years because he was able to kill the ball whenever he hit it. In 2014, he was in the 86th percentile in wOBA for pitches hit into play. As soon he drops from elite to very good in wOBA for pitches put into play, he becomes an average hitter.

As the chart below shows, when he’s in the 99th percentile for wOBA for pitches in play, he’s in the top five percent of all batters. If he drops to just the 95th percentile for wOBA for pitches in play, all of a sudden he’s down to the 77th percentile of all batters. If he drops to the 90th percentile, then he’s in the 65th percentile of all batters. Once he drops to the 75th percentile for wOBA for pitches in play, he’s in the 36th percentile of all batters and is a DFA candidate. The takeaway is that he can still be one of the best batters when putting pitches into play and still be worthless. The chart below shows where he ranks based on his wOBA for pitches in play.

The news gets even worse. On Twitter, Jon stated that he felt that Chris Davis had a good chance of becoming ineffective due to a collapse in offense if his contact rate drops any further because his walking ability is an indirect effect of his hard contact. I figured that was unlikely because I presumed that Davis will be average offensively before his ability to make hard contact degrades significantly. But when I looked at the data, it became clear that one could argue that Davis always had elite numbers when putting pitches into play but struggled earlier in his career because he hits few pitches in the strike zone compared to other batters and had a poor walk vs. strikeout ratio.

In addition, while Adam Dunn, Carlos Pena, and Jarrod Saltalamacchia each became ineffective once their wOBA when putting pitches into play degraded, it would appear that Melvin Upton and Ryan Howard started to become ineffective when their plate discipline degraded. It seems reasonable to presume that Chris Davis will start struggling if his primary competency of hammering pitches put into play starts to falter or if his plate discipline becomes significantly worse. It’s reasonable to argue that Jon and I both have reasonable chances of being right.

Chris Davis probably won’t become ineffective immediately, but should before his contract ends. There are a few encouraging outliers though. David Ortiz didn’t stop being elite in this regard until he was 36 while Nelson Cruz is still elite at 35. Davis’s contract only runs through 36 so if he can take after those players then the Orioles will likely be happy with the results of this signing. On the other hand, Ryan Howard started struggling at 32 and Adam Dunn started struggling at 31. This contract may look ugly if the Orioles only receive three years of strong performance from Davis.

This article shows that most players would rather have Adam Jones’ walk and strikeout percentages rather than Chris Davis. If so, this suggests that plate discipline is largely misunderstood and that a metric similar to K-BB should be used for both hitters and pitchers. With a few exceptions for players like Nori Aoki and Alberto Callaspo, it is better to put the ball into play than not. Indeed, in 2013, Chris Davis had a .657 wOBA when putting a pitch in the strike zone into play while a player that walked in every plate appearance would have a .690 wOBA.  It's easiest for batters to be successful by putting the ball into play.

Comparing Machado's And Schoop's Plate Discipline

After a poor offensive 2014 season in which Jonathan Schoop had a wRC+ of 64, he now boasts a wRC+ of 111 (as of games occurring after Wed Sept 23^rd) in 2015. This year, Schoop has shown good power with a HR/FB of 19.2% (32^nd out of 291 batters with 250 or more PAs and second highest for all middle infielders) and has improved his BABIP from .249 to .333. His weakness is that he has a BB% of 3.1%, a K% of 25.8% and would be better offensively with better plate discipline.  Schoop’s teammate, Manny Machado, has improved significantly in this regard in 2015 and therefore it makes sense to compare their performances to see where Machado improved and the areas where Schoop is weak.

The way I want to do this is by downloading data (this data is from ESPN Stats and Information) and using it to determine the likelihood of a called ball, strike, miss, foul ball or ball put into play for Machado, Schoop and the 10^th, 25^th, 75^th and 90^th quantiles in 2015 for all batters with at least fifty starts. I define these stats by taking the parameter (called balls for example) and dividing by total pitches which is different than how some sites aggregate this data. 

This first chart shows how they have performed overall. Machado has improved at racking up called balls as his numbers have increased from the 25^th quantile to between the 75^th and 90^th quantile. Machado’s called strike percentage also increased, but his swinging strike rate decreased and has resulted in Machado being less likely to have a pitch result in a strike in 2015 than in 2014. Machado is a bit less likely to put the ball into play in 2015 than in 2014 but by a minimal amount and dropped from the 75^th quantile to slightly above the median. This explains why his walk rate has significantly increased without other adverse consequences.

In contrast, Schoop was below the 10^th quantile in called balls in both 2014 and 2015. He had a low called strike rate in 2014 and has the lowest called strike rate in the majors in 2015 (the player with the second lowest is Adam Jones with Paredes at #7). Unfortunately, he also has the second highest swinging strike rate in the majors in 2015 (the player with the highest is Jimmy Paredes). It suggests that Schoop is swinging at too many pitches without a significant increase in his likelihood at putting the ball into play.

 

This next chart shows their performance with three balls. Machado has been consistent in these situations in both 2014 and 2015. This is surprising because in most other situations his plate discipline has improved in 2015 from 2014. Provided that he can continue to improve and become less aggressive in these situations, it would make sense that his walk rate should increase in the future to above 11%.

Schoop has a higher swinging strike rate than called ball rate in both 2014 and 2015 in these situations indicating that he is swinging at too many pitches he can’t hit which suggests he has a poor plan of attack. Infuriatingly, being swing happy hasn’t helped him actually put balls into play. All of those extra swings are merely turning into swinging strikes in these situations.

This next chart shows their performance with two strikes. In these situations, Machado has done a solid job at being sure that he can hit the pitches that he swings at and simply laying off the ones that are hard to hit making it hard to strike him out. This has resulted in Machado having a 40% chance of having a ball while getting a third strike less than 14% of the time. 

In contrast, Schoop is missing more than 20% of the time. Such a high swinging strike rate results in a lot of strikeouts. Interestingly, Machado is more likely to put the ball into play than Schoop in these situations despite the fact that Schoop swings more often. It’s pretty clear that swinging at bad pitches isn’t helping Schoop in the slightest. 

This basic pattern remains the same for other indicators. In situations when batters should swing, like when a pitch is in the strike zone or against a fastball, Machado doesn’t swing as often as Schoop does and this does result in a higher probability of a called strike. But because he chooses his spots better, he also has a lower probability of a swinging strike and puts the ball into play a similar percentage of the time as Schoop. 

This causes Machado to receive a higher called ball percentage and a similar percentage of actual strikes. 

In situations when batters shouldn’t swing, like when the pitch is out of the strike zone, Machado has a considerably higher called ball percentage and a lower actual strike/foul percentage. Schoop is more likely to put the ball into play in these situations which isn’t a good thing being as batters usually do better when putting pitches in the strike zone into play rather than putting pitches out of the strike zone into play. 

Schoop is struggling to reach his full potential because he swings too often at pitches that he is unable to put into play. The reason why he is doing this is that he’s actually had a lot of success this year if he can just put the ball into play regardless of whether the pitch is in the strike zone or not.  In 2015, Schoop has a .468 wOBA when putting pitches in the strike zone into play, which is about the 90^th quantile. For a middle infielder, those are excellent results. He also has a .401 wOBA when putting pitches out of the strike zone into play and that’s well above the 90^th quantile. In addition, his wOBA of .401 is above the average result for pitches in the strike zone. Schoop is swinging at a lot of pitches because he’s been successful when putting the ball into play. 

It doesn’t matter much whether he’s facing “hard” pitches (fastballs, cutters, splitters) or “soft” pitches (curveballs, sliders, changeups). Schoop has a .441 wOBA against hard pitches which is between the 75^th and 90^th quartile and a .459 wOBA against soft pitches which is well above the 90^th quantile. The bottom line is that Schoop is able to hit the ball when he puts the ball into play and therefore is overly enthusiastic.

The problem with this is that Schoop had a wOBA of .380 against pitches in the strike zone in 2014 or slightly below the mean result and a wOBA of .212 against pitches out of the strike zone or between the 10^th and 25^th quantile. If Schoop is able to continue crushing pitches put into play in 2016 like he did in 2015, then he can be aggressive and still be successful. If, however, his 2016 numbers regress to something between his 2014 and 2015 results, then he’ll only be able to be successful when putting pitches in the strike zone into play but not when putting pitches out of the strike zone into play. It would be possible for Schoop to be above average against pitches out of the strike zone while still having terrible numbers compared to average offensive performance against pitches in the strike zone.

In contrast, Machado was pretty consistent in 2014 and 2015 when putting balls into play. In both 2014 and 2015, his wOBA when putting pitches in the strike zone into play was around the 75^th quantile and about average when putting pitches out of the strike zone into play. His wOBA when putting pitches out of the strike zone into play was below the 10^th quantile of putting pitches in the strike zone into play. One reason why he may have become less aggressive at the plate is because he saw that he wasn’t having much success even when putting bad pitches into play.

Going forward, Machado improved significantly offensively in 2015 because he was able to improve his plate discipline. In contrast, Schoop improved significantly because he was able to crush opposing pitching when he was able to make contact. Schoop can make an even better improvement in 2016 by simply being more patient and waiting for his pitches rather than swinging at everything he can possibly hit.