Fire Gardy

I’m at the airport* right now, blogging from the iPhone. I imagine, therefore, that this post won’t be a long one.
 
* By the way, I’ll be at the dome on Saturday sporting my Free Jason Kubel t-shirt — courtesy of those crazy guys over at some blog called Fire Gardy — so if you see me feel free to run up and leave a comment. Or, as I understand it is commonly called in the non-blog world, say hello.
 
Anyway, I was just reading FanGraphs, and they’re looking at the players who tend to get called out on strikes. The guys they looked for strike out in over 20% of their plate appearances … And who do you think is right up there among the leaders of “percentage of strikeouts that are NOT of the swinging variety?”
 
http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/frozen-at-the-plate/
 
If you guessed Carlos Gomez (somehow) you’d be right!
 
I was pretty surprised to see this, given how often it seems like Gomez is flailing wildly at the ball. It just feels like he records a swinging strikeout a couple times per game.
 
But remember that talk in spring training about how Gomez was changing his approach at the plate, and that his newfound plate discipline would lead to more walks? Well, the walks haven’t come, but it’s certainly had an effect.
 
I don’t have copy-paste on my iPhone, and for the first time since I’ve had it this annoys me… because I can’t quote the article. So I encourage you to click through and actually read the thing.*
 
* Where you can also note that Gomez is the only guy in the top five that doesn’t really hit any home runs. I wonder what that means.
 
But if I remember the gist of it, Gomez has indeed changed his approach. He’s swinging at fewer pitches, and has actually cut down on the number of pitches outside the strike zone that he swings at. He’s also laying off more inside the zone, though.
 
So he’s cut way down on his forward facing K’s, with a smaller increase in backward facing ones. (I doubt this phone has that character.) Unfortunately, the new “discipline” is not accompanied by any new knowledge of the strike zone, or vision, which would help with his walks.
 
Still, I though this was pretty interesting. Every once in a while some statistic stands up and points out that one of your assumptions is incorrect. That happened to me this afternoon, and this it’s time for me to adjust the insults I hurl at Gomez while he’s “hitting.”
 
Who said stats aren’t useful?

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