Your 2018 Giants: Your Leaders in Non-Aggressive Hitting?

As you may or may not know, my mind tends to wander, and when I read things on the internet, one thing leads to another, generally.  I found through Twitter that The Hardball Times published its 2018 Annual online this year, and I guess the author of one of the chapters interested me so I clicked on his links to his prior articles, and I found one that he wrote on Hitter Aggressive Visualization.


ogc thoughts

The reason I bring this up is because two new key Giants players showed up in this study:  Andrew McCutchen and Evan Longoria. 

Here is the first chart:

As one can see, McCutchen's name is in there for all three seasons of data,  among the Top 15 least aggressive hitters.  You can see Brandon Belt's name there too for 2016.  Not urprisingly, Votto showed up twice on this chart, the other player to record multiple entries in the Top 15 seasons. 

What the study shows is that it pays to be patient at the plate.  Basically, wRC+ rose as aggression lessened.  Or, conversely, those who are very aggressive tend to not hit the ball with as much authority as they would if they had waited for a pitch that they can hit with hard contact.  That's something we all knew intuitively (and from Ted Williams' book and career), but this is the first I've seen that uses quantified data to come up with this.  It is nice that it is affirmed with real data. 

And over the three year period:


Here we see both McCutchen and Longoria there, first and fifteenth.  Odd that no Longoria single season showed up in the first chart, but the interpretation I take from this is that while the single season guys had a really good season to show up there, they were not as good over the three season period, unlike Longoria, who was like McCutchen, steadily good at around the same level each season of the study.  That relatively steady goodness put him into the Top 15 overall.

It is good to see both of them on these lists, since more aggression generally means lower runs created.  And that three Giants (including Belt) were among the least aggressive hitters, since this study showed a correlation between aggression and lower runs created.  Another sign of the benefits our lineup will get from including these two former greats.

Many people want to make fun of the fact that they are old and not anywhere near what they were five years ago, but this shows that both have still been among the elite hitters the past few seasons, in some way, and doing what they can to generate offensive value.  They might not be at the MVP levels that they were at years ago, but they are still good hitters, and any lineup would improve with good less-aggressive hitters in there.  And we just added two of them, not just one. 

And that fits in with the Giants talents in recent years, looking for players who are contact hitters (less strikeouts).  And studies have shown that a combination of higher walk rate along with lower strikeout rate is a good formula for hitting well in the majors. 

Go Giants!