Mentioning Freddie Freeman and Joey Votto in the Same Breath

Here are a few facts about Freddie Freeman. Over the past four years he's played 471 games for the Atlanta Braves, all as a first baseman. Through 2012 he was sort of mediocre, hitting just .269/.340/.449 with 45 home runs. That was just about enough above league average to make him an average overall first baseman, or maybe a little worse depending on how we rate his defense. In 2013, however, he hit .319/.396/.501 with 23 home runs and a remarkable 109 runs batted in, thanks in no small part to his .443 batting average with runners in scoring position. In 2013, however, he posted a .371 batting average on balls in play. FanGraphs thinks he's been worth 7.1 WAR so far in his career, 4.8 of which last season. Also, he was recently given an eight-year, $135 million extension by the Braves, keeping him under team control until just after he turns 32. Freddie Freeman, and the question of exactly how good he is, is in the news.

So when he caught my eye as I was playing around with the FanGraphs pitch discipline data more or less at random, I noticed. Specifically he caught my eye because he led the major leagues last year in Z-Swing%, which measures the percentage of pitches a batter saw that were (according to someone or other) in the strike zone that he swung at. It's good for your Z-Swing% to be nice and high, especially if your contact rate on pitches in the zone is also high, as you both avoid striking out and avoid letting hittable pitches go by. O-Swing%, how often you swing at pitches outside the zone, is on the other hand a bad thing; you want it nice and low, because almost always swinging at those pitches turns a called ball into a swinging strike, or weak contact at best(/worst?). A big differential between Z-Swing% and O-Swing% is best, as it shows you're generally recognizing pitches and making correct decisions about whether or not to swing at them.

Freeman swung at 85.7% of pitches in the strike zone last year. For reference, the next highest was Brandon Belt at 79.5%. Freeman in fact beat the highest career Z-Swing% among all players since 2002 (when the data begins), a mark held by Vladimir Guerrero at 84.3%. Freddie Freeman did not see very many called strikes, in other words. Freeman also managed to swing at just 34.9% of pitches out of the zone, which was in the upper half of the league but not terrible. Combine the two and we see that he swung at 50.8% more of the pitches in the zone than out of it, a mark which led the league. In third place by a whisker (behind Brandon Belt) was Joey Votto, plate discipline legend. By this metric, Freddie Freeman out-Votto'd Votto last year. That might help explain why he put up the 26.7% line drive rate, which almost certainly helped fuel the .371 BAbip. Of course, a different metric would be the ratio of swings in and out of the zone; here Freeman looks good rather than elite. Votto led baseball in that figure last year, by a lot. He swung 335% as often at pitches in the zone; next best was Dan Uggla (really?) at 290.5%. (Shin-Soo Choo is next, which makes more sense; A.J. Pierzynski is last, which makes all kinds of sense. He swung at nearly half of all pitches he saw out of the zone; that would be a pretty high overall swing rate.) The reason, of course, is that Freeman swung a lot more than Votto overall, swinging 55.2% of the time against just 40.3% for Votto.

The obvious question is, of course, what this suggests about how sustainable Freeman's success could be going forward. Plate discipline is thought to be pretty sustainable, pretty non-random, and if it's driving some of his factors that we usually think of as random, like BAbip or RISP average, to be abnormally high, well, the Braves might've just made one hell of a deal. I don't really know how to evaluate whether a big Z-Swing% - O-Swing% differential is likely to lead to a high line drive rate or whatever. I do know that Freeman's 2013 numbers were in keeping with his career numbers but taken to the next level. His Z-Swing% had been around 77% previously, which would still have been near the top of the league in 2013. Then it jumped, a lot, while his O-Swing% stayed dead flat. That's a recipe for success. But he's probably not going to keep hacking away at strikes like he's Vlad the Impaler, and insofar as this extraordinary number was driving his success, seeing a reversion to just being among the league leaders might make him revert to the player we used to think he was.

Also, plate discipline stats are cool.

Because I am unable to resist I will close by giving Barry Bonds' figures, essentially to shame Joey Votto for how bad he is at laying off pitches out of the zone. After 2002, Barry Bonds swung at 67.1% of pitches in the strike zone, nearly identical to Votto's figure this year. But he swing at all of 13.3% of pitches out of the zone. One in eight. And that includes pitches out of the zone by like an inch. He swung at five times more pitches in the zone than out of it. For shame, Joey Votto, for shame.

(Interestingly Bonds does not hold the record for lowest career O-Swing%, at least for the era we've got data for; that honor goes to then-former Met John Olerud, at a stunning 10.5%, barely one-sixth his 60.1% Z-Swing%.)