I was initially planning to write about a baseball episode of Necessary Roughness this week. It was a show I’d never seen, and I had no idea what to expect going in. It turns out I hate the whole thing, and it was more about sex than baseball, and I didn’t feel like writing anymore about that. One thing did catch my attention, though; a fan was describing the play of her favorite slumping athlete and declared that in the previous night’s game, he swung at 12 pitches and missed all of them.
To put this into context, I looked at the top five batters in 2020 by swinging strike/total pitch percentage, otherwise known as SwStr% on FanGraphs.