Do Luis Urías and the Brewers Need to Get More Aggressive Early in Counts?

8 minutes ago, Fear The Chorizo said:

With his current approach, Urias draws one walk for every two Ks, and maintains an OBP roughly 100 points higher than his batting average while slugging at a pretty good clip for a utility infielder.  There's a time and a place to try and ambush a get me over strike, and anecdotally Urias has been known to do just that - I don't see the point in trying to force all these Brewer hitters to become uber aggressive in effort to try and hit every strike deemed a meatball, particularly ones on the roster who actually don't have a K rate problem and who draw a good amount of walks as part of their offensive value.

I get that mindset, but let me make three points:

1. "uber aggressive" is not on the table here. What the Brewers (and Urias especially) are doing is more like uber passivity. The league swings at the first pitch about 30 percent of the time. I'm not suggesting that number should be 35 percent for Urías, but rather, that it should be much closer to 30 percent than to the 20.9 percent he had last year, given his other skills.

2. It's dangerous to fall into the trap of evaluating a player's plate discipline by looking at their walk and strikeout rates alone, and especially to do so by noting the gap between their average in OBP--for just the reasons I enumerate in the piece. There are hitters, and I would argue that Urías is one, who trade a few too many hits for their walks. And this adjustment likely wouldn't change his strikeout rate much at all, because he's a guy who makes contact at a high rate, and I'm advocating that he start attacking more early in counts, which would likely mean fewer two-strike counts and fewer Ks, though also, as you note, fewer free passes.

3. Remember that when we're talking about adjustments a hitter might make, the alternative isn't not adjusting--it's adjusting differently. Every player, and especially every player as young as Urías, has to be in a constant state of adjusting and counteradjusting, or else the league will figure them out and eat them alive. This is more about what I think the direction of his next adjustment should be, than about radically resetting him as a hitter.

Your overall point is well-taken, though. Urías is a valuable hitter, with or without the kind of level jump I envision.

35 minutes ago, Fear The Chorizo said:

There's also a fine line between using a comprehensive season-long set of data to come to a conclusion that a player like Urias isn't attacking early in the count enough, while neglecting to put it into proper anecdotal context - a different poster pointed out Urias' overall swing rate dipped during a chunk of the season when he was going through thumb injury issues, kind of an expected thing.

How many of the called strikes Urias let go early in counts last year were middle-middle fastballs?  I don't see anywhere in the article pointing to specific data that Urias was letting too many middle-middle fastballs or even any waist-high strikes sail by early in counts without swinging, just that he's letting called strikes go by.  All that's included is a chart showing average fastball height based on # of strikes in a count across the entire league, which differs in total by about 3.5 inches.  There's a big difference between swinging at a meatball and a pitcher's strike early in a count.  Am I missing something with the graphic stating he does most of his damage on middle middle fastballs, but there isn't a distribution of pitches called strikes that Urias didn't swing at that would indicate there's a ton of hittable pitches Urias is letting go by compared to peers?

And the article mentions Urias may be trading too many singles in effort to gain more walks...isn't the end result of a walk or a single in most at bats the same for a hitter - meaning they end up on 1st?  I get that a bloop single is often better than a walk with runners on base in terms of scoring runs, but once again specific scenarios and breakdowns of what Urias' approach was in those spots need to be looked at before simply stating in the article that if he swings the bat more he's going to be a better hitter this year.

 

 

You’re absolutely right that all of those nuances matter. I’m still getting started here, so you’d have little way of knowing this yet, but my approach and my style here are not going to include putting everything I know about a subject into a single piece. Just as players have to make ongoing adjustments, I intend to keep up a constant and evolving conversation about the game. Some of that will happen in the comments. Some will happen in later pieces on related subjects, especially as we see how the relevant topics themselves progress. If that’s not the way you prefer to digest this stuff, that’s understandable. Just don’t fight a perceived oversimplification with the real thing.

Now, to address that last point, which I do think is substantial: a single and a walk aren’t equal in value, not least because sometimes when you hit it well enough to single, you actually get a double. Plus the obvious added value of runners being able to advance more on hits than walks. When I say he’s trading too many singles for walks, I also don’t mean that I think there’s a 1:1 substitution happening. I think he might be trading 20 singles for 15 walks and five outs, and at that point, the problem becomes obvious.