Thursday, May 10, 2007

Looking for quallity at-bats

There's been a lot of talk lately about the state of the Twins hitting. Obviously they aren't scoring enough runs and overall the stats they are putting up aren't very pretty. Numbers don't tell the whole story though of if a player is taking good at-bats (especially at this point of the year). All this got me wondering how many quality at-bats the Twins are taking. What makes a quality at-bat is highly subjective but it's usually pretty easy to spot a good or bad one so I decided to study each at bat the Twins' hitters took yesterday and try to determine how many quality at bats we were taking and who was responsible for them. I really didn't worry weather or not the player got a hit but was more concerned with them swinging at good pitches, working the count and hitting the ball hard. Here is a chart of my observations:

To summarize my ratings of good at-bats:

Castillo = 3 for 5
Punto = 2 for 4
Hunter = 0 for 4
Cuddyer = 1 for 4
Morneau = 2 for 4
Cirillo = 2 for 4
Redmond = 3 for 4
Rabe = 1 for 3
Kubel = 0 for 1
Bartlett = 2 for 4
Team Overall = 16 for 37

With such a small sample size it's hard to say what percentage should be considered average but my guess is that an average player/team should be able to produce quality at-bats 50% of the time so for the night the Twins came up a short of this mark. Obviously Redmond and Castillo had the best at-bats overall. Morneau's numbers are a bit deceiving though as his two quality at bats were walks he didn't really have to work for and the other two at-bats he stuck out with terrible swings. Likewise Cirillo had a couple quality at bat's but he also bounced into two double plays. It's just one game though so it would be interesting to see how things play out over a longer period of time. Anyway you look at it, the Twins are struggling at the plate right now.

1 comment:

Comedy Club said...

That's really cool. Nice work.