Patience is a Virtue: Hitter Patience in the MLB

Patience at the plate can have a significant impact on a players offensive success.  It is a rudimentary concept that the better pitches a hitter sees and in turn swings at, the more successful the hitter will be.  There are some anomalies to this idea.  For example, the great slugger, Vladimir Guerrero, who seemed to be able to make contact with any pitch located in the stadium.  However, there is also the category of hitters who are too patient at the plate and in turn put themselves in inauspicious counts to hit with.  With all this being said, I want to dedicate this next post to evaluating the patience and contact abilities of hitters in Major League Baseball.  I want to analyze and discern which hitters are the most effectively patient.  In order to perform this analysis, I will be using several new statistics which I have not discussed yet in any of my previous posts.  These statistics are Pitches per Plate Appearance (Pit/PA), Swung-At Strike Percentage (AS/Str), and Contact Percentage (Con).  These are not my own statistics, I obtained them from Baseball-Reference.com.

The data I will be using is from the 2014 MLB Season, as of the All-Star break.  The following list of players is the top 50 hitters of the 2014 MLB season, in terms of Pitches per Plate Appearance.  The players are ranked in descending order.  I only considered players with over 200 At-Bats, in order to avoid any statistical discrepancies or biases.

Rank	Name	Pit/PA	AS/Str	Con	BA	OBP	AS/Str+Con
1	Carlos Santana#	4.48	65.40%	77.30%	0.207	0.349	1.427
2	Mike Napoli	4.48	66.30%	72.50%	0.266	0.389	1.388
3	Brett Gardner*	4.47	61.40%	84.00%	0.279	0.353	1.454
4	Adam Dunn*	4.47	67.50%	67.90%	0.224	0.361	1.354
5	Mike Trout	4.44	65.50%	79.50%	0.31	0.4	1.450
6	David DeJesus*	4.35	67.90%	86.20%	0.269	0.367	1.541
7	Joey Votto*	4.32	68.90%	79.10%	0.255	0.39	1.480
8	Matt Carpenter*	4.3	56.40%	87.50%	0.283	0.377	1.439
9	Yasmani Grandal#	4.25	69.00%	72.10%	0.21	0.299	1.411
10	Mike Olt	4.24	65.20%	62.80%	0.144	0.23	1.280
11	Christian Yelich*	4.23	66.90%	78.70%	0.274	0.353	1.456
12	Nick Swisher#	4.22	70.50%	74.80%	0.208	0.288	1.453
13	Grady Sizemore*	4.21	71.80%	80.80%	0.218	0.289	1.526
14	Russell Martin	4.2	69.20%	75.90%	0.279	0.407	1.451
15	Brian Dozier	4.19	62.30%	82.60%	0.242	0.34	1.449
16	Lucas Duda*	4.19	68.40%	72.50%	0.257	0.356	1.409
17	Corey Dickerson*	4.19	73.60%	76.50%	0.329	0.396	1.501
18	Brock Holt*	4.18	60.90%	85.70%	0.326	0.371	1.466
19	Jonny Gomes	4.18	64.80%	73.70%	0.237	0.33	1.385
20	Austin Jackson	4.17	67.60%	79.70%	0.253	0.316	1.473
21	Luis Valbuena*	4.17	71.00%	79.60%	0.25	0.336	1.506
22	Alex Avila*	4.15	69.60%	67.60%	0.235	0.346	1.372
23	Xander Bogaerts	4.14	66.80%	75.20%	0.236	0.313	1.420
24	Curtis Granderson*	4.13	71.20%	72.70%	0.24	0.349	1.439
25	Paul Goldschmidt	4.11	65.40%	74.40%	0.308	0.401	1.398
26	Jayson Werth	4.11	63.70%	79.90%	0.278	0.365	1.436
27	Dexter Fowler#	4.11	72.00%	79.20%	0.27	0.377	1.512
28	Chris Davis*	4.11	79.50%	64.40%	0.2	0.308	1.439
29	Everth Cabrera#	4.1	71.40%	78.00%	0.218	0.256	1.494
30	Mike Moustakas*	4.1	77.30%	82.50%	0.189	0.253	1.598
31	Steve Pearce	4.1	76.10%	76.10%	0.311	0.38	1.522
32	Dustin Pedroia	4.09	67.60%	87.20%	0.28	0.347	1.548
33	Andrew McCutchen	4.09	73.20%	76.40%	0.321	0.418	1.496
34	Justin Upton	4.09	77.60%	71.20%	0.278	0.347	1.488
35	Joe Mauer*	4.09	62.10%	83.10%	0.271	0.342	1.452
36	Seth Smith*	4.09	66.40%	78.90%	0.279	0.382	1.453
37	Mark Teixeira#	4.09	68.40%	79.50%	0.239	0.34	1.479
38	Chris Iannetta	4.09	73.30%	71.70%	0.278	0.392	1.450
39	Edwin Encarnacion	4.08	69.30%	80.80%	0.277	0.368	1.501
40	Carlos Ruiz	4.08	62.50%	82.30%	0.257	0.363	1.448
41	Ichiro Suzuki*	4.08	67.30%	84.70%	0.291	0.341	1.520
42	Ryan Howard*	4.07	79.00%	65.70%	0.221	0.302	1.447
43	Desmond Jennings	4.07	66.60%	77.60%	0.247	0.339	1.442
44	Shin-Soo Choo*	4.07	65.50%	77.10%	0.239	0.358	1.426
45	Garrett Jones*	4.07	75.60%	78.00%	0.253	0.321	1.536
46	Victor Martinez#	4.07	70.00%	91.70%	0.33	0.392	1.617
47	Brandon Hicks	4.07	79.10%	60.50%	0.162	0.28	1.396
48	Giancarlo Stanton	4.06	72.40%	67.80%	0.296	0.397	1.402
49	Alex Gordon*	4.05	71.30%	79.80%	0.271	0.349	1.511
50	Matthew Joyce*	4.05	73.90%	74.10%	0.27	0.351	1.480

In order to facilitate my analysis of the contact and patience of hitters, I combined the statistics of Swung-At Strike Percentage and Contact Percentage.  This new percentage is in the last column.  Also, I have taken the liberty of highlighting players names in either green, yellow, or red distinguishing three different classes of hitters within the list.

The first class of hitters I would like to discuss and analyze are the names in green.  These players are the ones whose statistics convey very effective patience at the plate.  These players also display pretty good contact percentages.  The criteria to qualify for this group is as follows:

1)  In order to qualify for this category, a player must have a AS/Str+Con Percentage greater than 1.400.  This stat displays great patience and contact for the hitter.

2)  For the purposes of determining the players effectiveness of their patience, I took into consideration the players Batting Average and On-Base Percentage.  In order to qualify for this group, a player must have both a Batting Average of or greater than the league average .253 and On-Base Percentage of or greater than the league average of .316 (Baseball-Reference.com).

This class is comprised of many world class hitters, including Mike Trout, Victor Martinez, Giancarlo Stanton, and Edwin Encarnacion.  However, the outright leader of this group would be Victor Martinez.  Martinez has an incredible 91.7% contact percentage.  To elucidate this fact, I will rephrase it in the following way.  Roughly 92 out of every 100 pitches Martinez swings at, he makes contact with.  There are also some talented, young players to watch in this group.  These players being Christian Yelich of the Marlins, Brock Holt of the Red Sox, and Corey Dickerson of the Rockies.  Each of these players have come up several times in my past posts and analyses, proving themselves to be offensive instigators in their respective line-ups.

The next category of hitters is the one with the yellow highlighted names.  These are the players on the list that display effective patience at the plate.  The criteria for this group is as follows:

1)  In order to qualify for this category, a player must have a AS/Str+Con Percentage greater than 1.350.

2)  In order to qualify for this group, a player must have either a Batting Average of or greater than the league average .253 or On-Base Percentage of or greater than the league average of .316 (Baseball-Reference.com).

The last category of hitters is the one with the red highlighted names.  These are the players who have ineffective patience at the plate.  These hitters have neither a Batting Average or On-Base Percentage greater than the respective league averages.  For a specific example lets examine Brandon Hicks.  Brandon sees 4.07 pitches on average per at-bat.  He has a terrific Swung-At Strike percentage of 79.1%, however his contact percentage of 60.5% is very low.  These statistics show me that Hicks in fact has a good eye for the strike zone, but suffers from a lack of contact.  Several players in this category share this same shortcoming.

Lastly, I would like to calculate the correlation between patience and offensive success for the players on the list above.

	Green	Yellow	Red
Total	27	13	10
Overall %	54.00%	26.00%	20.00%

The breakdown for the total percentages of players from each category is in the chart above.  54% of the players on the list have very effective patience at the plate.  In addition, 26% of the players have effective patience at the plate.  Thus, the total of players who have effective patience, at the least, is 80%.  With that being said, these statistics corroborate the concept that patience at the plate augments a hitters success.  Not to mention the fact that patience can also help remove starters from the game via throwing more pitches, so these patient hitters can indirectly contribute to the success of the entire line-up as well.  This contribution would be the removal of a starting pitcher who is doing well, but accumulates a high pitch count.