If you are an analytically savvy baseball fan, you probably feel pretty comfortable about your ability to evaluate pitching and hitting. For pitchers, you want to see lots of strikeouts, and as few homers and walks as possible. Ideally, you’d like to see ground balls, but more pertinently, you’d like to see weak contact. You want to see swings and misses, and batters chasing pitches out of the zone. You want to see evidence that batters are getting fooled by what a pitcher is throwing. For hitters, you want to see power and walks. You want to see a player hitting the ball hard, and that they’re able to identify which pitches they can’t hit hard, and hold back from swinging at them.
What Statcast’s Newest Fielding Metric Says About Reds Infielders, Offseason
