Hitting for Contact in the Strikeout Era

Last week I wrote about how much time Red Sox’s batters have taken between pitches and about how research from Rob Arthur at FiveThirtyEight showed that doing so could be advantageous. Since my article was posted last week the Red Sox lost the throne of slowest offensive group, but they are still a bunch of dawdlers nonetheless. As I noted last week, while their slowpoke ways could be annoying, they are very good at making contact: they strikeout less often than any team in baseball. This means there is plenty of action amongst all the waiting for pitches and that is good for us fans. But while a lot of time may be advantageous for batters it is also apparently good for a pitcher’s fastball velocity, which is in turn good for blowing batters away. This leads to a question: what gives when a dawdling, high-contact offense meets a flame-throwing pitcher who racks up strikeouts?

As good a place to start as any is the Red Sox Batting Power/Finesse split from Baseball Reference (through Sunday’s game):

Power pitchers are defined as those in the top third of the league in strikeouts plus walks, while Finesse pitchers are in the bottom third. As you can see, the Red Sox have been better against Finesse pitchers than against Power pitchers by 94 points of OPS. That on its own is not all that interesting, as almost everybody knocks around the Finesse pitchers and takes their licks against the Power guys. The interesting part is that the Red Sox’s 94-point difference is smaller than the league average of 115 points, ranking them 11^th in baseball. What’s more is the last column, which shows that the Red Sox have been only 2 percent better than the rest of the league against Finesse pitchers but 8 percent better than the rest of the league against Power pitchers.

Let’s see what that looks like at the player level. Here is how Red Sox players have fared on this split (70 season plate appearances minimum):

As I said, it is typical for players to beat up on Finesse pitchers and have difficulty against the Power guys, but four of the everyday Red Sox players (five if Pablo Sandoval is counted) have done more damage against the Power guys, and Mookie Betts’, while not better against Power pitchers, has an OPS difference that is better than league average. And even Xander Bogaerts, who has fared considerably worse against Power pitchers, has a solid OPS against them. Interestingly, Benintendi, Pedroia, Betts, and Bogaerts have the four lowest strikeout rates among the players in the table. Their contact-making ways are providing some immunity against the hard-throwing strikeout machines.

Much of the ground in the high-contact-offense v. high-velocity-strikeout-pitching was covered a few years ago when the Kansas City Royals made their back-to-back World Series appearances (winning once) with an offense that was relentless in its ability to string hits together. Trying to explain the Royals success, Ben Lindbergh, with the help of Mitchel Lichtman, found that from 2010-2015 contact hitters did fare better against power pitchers than did non-contact-focused batters. For 2017, at the team level, this relation is present but not strong. For example, the Red Sox lead the way in not striking out, but their 108 sOPS+ mark against Power pitchers, while good, only ranks 12^th in baseball, and is a far-cry from the power-pitching-destruction-units of the Dodgers, Astros and Nationals (128, 127, 120 sOPS+, respectively). All told, the correlation between team strikeout rate and OPS difference for the Power/Finesse split was small (r = 0.15), and only slightly better when related with their sOPS+ against Power pitchers (r = -0.26). Being able to avoid striking out helps combat power pitchers’ attacks, but there is clearly more to the story.

After the Royals’ World Series win in 2015, the discussion of how they had changed baseball forever with their blueprint for roster construction was rampant, but in the end it was mostly just a hyperbolic reaction to something that was remarkable in the moment. The Royals have continued to strikeout less than most, and they have actually performed better against Power pitchers than Finesse pitchers in 2017; their problem is that they have not really hit any type of pitcher very well since those magical postseason runs. Alas, the sweeping revolution of contact-focused lineups has not happened – at least is hasn’t yet – but these 2017 Red Sox certainly do bear a resemblance to those championship Royals’ offenses: they make contact and string hits together to score runs. Their ability to stay away from the strikeout, which comes from their continued success hitting with two strikes, makes them a tough offense for Power and Finesse pitchers alike. Ideally, the Red Sox get the postseason glory of those Royals teams, but carry the success beyond two seasons.

Photo by Mike DiNovo – USA TODAY Sports