Brandon Phillips has always been a guy who swings at a lot of pitches. I decided to take a look at how he was against different speeds of pitches. The results were actually pretty interesting.
It seems that the slower the pitch, the tougher it is for Phillips to make contact with the pitch. The 95+ and 74 or below have less than a combined 50 pitches to work with, so take those numbers with a grain of salt really. Still, he swings at more than half the pitches he sees on everything else and seems to miss a lot more often as the pitch is slower. As an experiment I would not throw him a single fastball an entire game and see how it turns out for him as an opposing manager. He gets his dose of fastballs thrown to him, but I wonder how long it is until the 70 MPH stuff starts coming more often as he swings and misses at an extremely high rate on it.
2 responses so far ↓
1 jinaz // May 13, 2008 at 9:28 pm
Neat. Two questions:
1. What are MLB averages for swings and misses at different MPH’s? Do most players miss more on offspeed stuff?
2. Is the slow stuff more likely to be thrown out of the zone? Because, as I think you’ve shown (and others have as well), Brandon will pretty much swing at anything.
-j
2 Doug Gray // May 14, 2008 at 9:21 pm
Justin,
I honestly don’t have an answer to either of your question. I can really only go on what the Reds pitchers do and that doesn’t really give us a good sample to work with.
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