That’s fine but I don’t think not swinging at everything thrown to him is some new revolutionary hitting style that was brought on by analytics or something. I guarantee being more pitch selective is something Bagwell, the guy who consistently walked 100 times a year, would have told Altuve himself.
Baseball values high end results. I'd assume conventional approaches have less variance because a consistent hitter is one that doesn't get on base often (i.e., the more outs a batter makes, the more consistent they are). FanGraphs had an article in 2022 that had Alvarez as one of the most inconsistent hitters as he had a lot of abnormally good plate appearances versus the median making an out plate appearance.
He doesn't strike out more now though because he's swinging less at borderline pitches in two strike counts. He strikes out more now because, at the least, he whiffs more often because he's targeting types of pitches/locations that are conducive for generating fly balls but that also more often result in whiffs as compared to his earlier approach. I don't know if he's done more than that like adjusting his VBA significantly but that would be an interesting story for someone like Rome to write one of these days.
Bagwell doing something on the playing field does not equal it isn't analytics. Analytics love what Bagwell did during games. Bagwell is very knowledgeable on the how something is done on the baseball field. Bagwell was a very gifted player and did a lot of things analytics likes by instinct or just flat out skill. I'm very skeptical on his ability to evaluate guys in the current environment. Analytics is just using information that is available and being able to judge what that infomation has value or not. A lot of things done in the past were done well. I'd say most things were. It is just that when something that has been done a certain way forever in the baseball world is found to be less than optimal, the non-analytics people bring out their pitch forks instead of judging arguments on their merits.
This is an interesting point that I think highlights how our own intuition leads us astray at times. Particularly, as I understand it, this seems to be saying that success as a hitter in baseball is relatively rare and thus the best hitters must necessarily have significant variance given they are achieving that rare state of success more often than the average guy. However, intuitively you would think the opposite and consistency = good which leads to thinking that to be a "good" hitter is to look something like a poor man's version of Tony Gwynn.
Yep. This is like scouts trying to tell us for decades that "so and so's fastball is flat" as if their eyes were good enough to tell the shape of a 4-Seam fastball. Now that we have pitch tracking data, we know that the flatest fastballs are actually the best. People assume flat would be easier to hit, but batters have lived their entire lives subject to a gravitational field that causes thrown fastballs to bend. Their hands "know" where the ball will go under a normal amount of spin. It is the abnormal high spin, high velocity fastballs that defy gravity and are flatter that end up tougher to hit.
Jeter played SS, and seemed adament about playing SS despite it probably being better for the Yankees to have a better defensive SS. On Bagwell, this could be my bias, but it seemed like he just was incredibly gifted that he just knew what to do. I'm almost always skeptical that someone as gifted as he was can teach others. One of the buzzwords in basketball analytics is "processing speed". Bagwell had tons and tons of processing speed and a great recall of past events that the vast majority of baseball players don't have.
Like I said, smartest players. The one Bagwell play that sticks with me was at 1B on a bunt or grounder to him, he made a tag of the runner off 1st, threw to 2B, then got the force at 1st (in some order, it's been a while), and he basically stood there and explained to the umpires why everyone was out. And he was right, and some discussion they agreed. Jeter had crazy baseball smarts too.
They don't think it is a contradiction. Jeff Bagwell used the same logic to become a Hall of Famer. Bagwell was a high batting average guy with almost no power and very few strikeouts. He adjusted his swing in the Fall before his rookie season and over the next few seasons, where he lost speed, increased his size, changed his approach, had his strikeouts go up and saw his power greatly increase.
If Bagwell believed that, he never would have changed his swing to generate power. He also wouldn't have increased his muscle strength. Bagwell was a gifted guy at putting the bat on the ball and working the count. He sacrificed batting average along the way.
It's always been totally crazy to me how casual baseballfan thinks that scouting and analytics are somehow in a fight, zero-sum style. Literally nobody thinks that way, nobody who matters, at least.
This is the kind of stupid **** that annoys me about Baseball Prospectus or other publications. Jose Altuve hit .390 in the minor leagues in 2011.... that isn't a typo, he nearly hit 400.... and had a 600% on slugging and like 35 extra base hits in half a season of games. For his career in the minors he was like a 330 hitter. Yet the comparison is Rafael Belliard? Just biased and lazy.
They go together - and often times what the analytics say just confirm what the scouts see with their own eyes. There have been some cases of teams leaning more heavily one way - but analytics are nothing but a tool for scouts.
Bagwell is just incredibly gifted? They would have been news... he wasn't a big time prospect, he was stuck behind Cooper with the Red Sox, and earned the job in spring training. He always had a talent to work the count and had some great instincts, but there were lots of players with faster bats, that were bigger, had more power, faster and could pick up the ball earlier off the hand.
The evaluation on Pressly is even more ridiculous. 2017: he’s never going to be a star 2016: he seems doomed to remain an anonymous middle reliever.
"gifted to know what to do" = baseball smarts, that's not something you're born with, like natural talent, that's something you hone Imagine if Altuve had Bagwell's baserunning brain? He'd have stolen 500 bases by now.
That's interesting and I didn't know that about Bagwell. Looking at his old minor league stats, seems he played one season in A ball in '89 and a season in AA in '90 before being promoted in '91. He did not have very much power at all in the minors as you say and was running around a 11% K rate in AA before being called up and in his first MLB season he hit 15 home runs and ran close to a 18% K rate. I wonder if for Bagwell however it wasn't a question of simply getting better than consciously deciding to make the change from being a high batting average slap hitter to a high ISO slugger as he still maintained the high batting average and ran very good K rates throughout his career. I think Altuve is a better example, and why I think it's reasonable to question whether Bagwell (or someone using Bagwell-like thinking) would choose to employ the change in style that Altuve chose, is that Altuve was already finding success with his old method. IMO, the apex of "Classic" Altuve is 2014 when he had taken his old approach about as far as it could possibly go and this being several years into his career. That was his first really good year and he only hit 7 homeruns and hardly walked. He (or the team or someone else - this would be really interesting to know) had the foresight to understand that while 2014 was exceptional, it probably wasn't going to be replicated again and he had the underlying abilities (as odd as that probably seemed at the time) to become an entirely different and even better player. He could go from being someone like a rich man's Dubon having a career year to a perennial all star/HoFer by focusing on the aspect of his game you would assume by looking at him should be a permanent, set in stone liability - his power. Indeed, in some ways 2015 was a step back for him from 2014 (offensive output was cut in half) but he was finding traction (doubled his homerun output) and in 2017 we saw the full expression of the "New" Altuve that we have been blessed with since that time. It's an incredible story and Altuve is an inspiring human being.
