You're Not Hack Wilson

One of the most important things a hitter can do is work the count, the seemingly redundant act of making a pitcher throw pitches, not just to tire him out, but to increase your chances as a hitter of having a productive result. In Moneyball Michael Lewis compared it to playing a hand in blackjack. With each subsequent pitch the batter is increasing or decreasing the odds of something good happening. Take a look at the chart below, it's a current look at how batters are doing in any given count.

The league average OPS is .737, meaning of the 12 possibilities there are  seven hitter zones and three pitcher zones.  Eric Hinske said he feels the most comfortable and "excited" in 2-0 counts, and for good reason, he has an exponentially higher chance of making a loud crack occur.

Consider this more than a celebration of cerebration; instead think of it as simply tilting the deck in a hitter's favor. The first three pitches can tell you a ton about the impending result in an at-bat, any combination of 3-0, 0-2 (foul off), 1-2, or 2-1 is met with its own percentages of something good happening,  which is more or less the point of hitting. It makes sense that hitters want to get the count to the point where it favors them, which is why doing certain things, namely swinging at pitches outside of the strike zone, almost never make sense.

Above you see each of the Rays hitter next to a statistic called "O-Swing%" essentially the percentage of pitches outside of the zone swung at by the hitter. Gomes, Crawford, and Floyd are the most guilty of this "crime", with Floyd surprising me a bit since I don't usually consider him a hacker. Obviously swinging at a ball is not only hurting your own cause, considering contact is hardly guaranteed (Crawford has the best "O-Contact%" and even then it's only around 68%) and usually that means the pitch is either inside, outside, low, or high and not necessarily a pitch you can do something with.  The real crime however is taking away from a potentially sweeter pitch if the player simply takes the pitch and adds a ball to the count.

Enter Melvin Emmanuel Upton. When I say he's the Rays best hitter, I mean he's the Rays best hitter. He absolutely refuses to swing at anything out of the zone, a paltry 13.33% which ranks him as the 14^th best at resisting temptations. The players "in front" of him include Bobby Abreu, Gabe Gross, Frank Thomas, Jack Cust, and Jason Giambi, not awful company whatsoever, on the balls he does swing out of the zone on Upton makes contact roughly 65 percent of the time.

Of all major league hitters Upton has seen the 27^th most pitches (in between Brian Giles and Ken Griffey Jr.) and the only Ray above Upton is the guy I called the most underrated player on the team last fall, Akinori Iwamura, who ranks 11^th, but to be fair hits leadoff. Iwamura is second on the Rays only to Upton in O-Swing% at 18.63 and he makes contact with 65.56% of the pitches he swings at out of the zone.

A point I'd like to make about Crawford in all of this is when he swings 1-1, 2-1, 3-1, or even in a full count situation his OPS is over .800. The problem is that he's only swung in 60 of those situations, and 40 first pitch situations, in which his OPS is only .687. Looking at 3.29 pitches per plate appearance simply isn't good, and if Carl really does want to improve he needs to learn that taking pitches doesn't mean you're weak or that you can't hit a baseball, it means you understand that the pitcher's job is to get you out, and recognize that the odds can only go up in your favor if you take a few of his pitches.