Resident Fantasy Genius: From Mash to Mush

Over the weekend, New York Post writer and Baseball Prospectus subscriber Joel Sherman e-mailed the BP crew looking for some help in confirming a suspicion he had about the Yankees for an article he was writing. Joel suspected that the Bombers lacked hitters who could handle top-shelf pitching. After I ran some numbers for him, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at all major-league hitters and see who feasts on weaker pitching and who fares especially well against stronger pitching.

Using Baseball Prospectus’ 2012 PECOTA projections as a proxy for a pitcher’s true talent level, I’ve defined “strong pitching” as all pitchers with a 3.50 PECOTA ERA or better and “weak pitching” as all pitchers with a 4.50 PECOTA ERA or worse. Then, I calculated a hitter’s TAv when he faced each type of pitcher in 2011 (using a simplified TAv formula that doesn’t take into account ballpark or league or any of the advanced stuff).

First, let’s take a look at the hitters who feasted on weak pitching in 2011:

This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. The best hitters should, logically, perform best against weak pitching, and what we wind up seeing is (predictably) a veritable “who’s who” of the game’s best hitters. What we should be more interested in is which hitters overperform their usual production when facing weak pitchers the most:

This list is much more interesting. The likes of Joey Bats and Miguel Cabrera have fallen off, but there are still some very notable names at the top of the list. Mike Stanton, one of the brightest young hitters in the game, and Curtis Granderson, one of 2011’s biggest breakouts, lead the pack. Other elite or near-elite hitters join them on the top-15 list, including Butler, Cruz, Hamilton, and Zobrist.

Of course, demolishing bad pitching isn’t necessarily a bad thing unto itself. After all, if the hitter can merely hold his own against good pitching, he’ll be just fine. What is potentially worrisome is the hitter who can take advantage of weak pitching but struggles against superior competition. This next list shows us the players with the most extreme combination of overperforming against weak pitching and underperforming against strong pitching:

This list might even be more interesting than the previous one. While there are some hapless hitters like Aaron Miles and Mark Ellis present, as we’d expect, there are quite a few stars here as well. Gone are Wonderboy and Zorilla, only to be replaced by Big Papi, Ryan Howard, and B.J. Upton. Stanton and Grandy still top the list, though, as not only are they Millwood-mashers, but they essentially transformed into Alberto Gonzalez and Eli Whiteside when facing the game’s elite hurlers this past season.

While all of this is very interesting, it’s important to keep in mind that we shouldn’t try to draw any concrete conclusions from this data. While I’ve narrowed my lists to hitters who logged at least 100 plate appearances against both strong and weak pitching, we’re still dealing with incredibly small sample sizes. Additionally, it’s unclear just how repeatable these numbers are. Just because a hitter struggled against great pitching in 2011 doesn’t necessarily mean he will do so again in 2012.

When evaluating young players, scouts will sometimes express concerns that a player struggles against stronger competition and has put up the numbers he has by succeeding against lesser talent, capitalizing on their mistakes and taking advantage of their less-than-stellar stuff. While this can be a legitimate concern for players coming up through the minors or coming over from Japan or another non-United States nation, it’s not as clear how worrisome this is for players who are already in the major leagues. While a hitter who struggles against top-notch competition in Double-A is likely to struggle against any and all major-league pitching (after all, even Miguel Batista is better than most Double-A hurlers), a major leaguer who struggles against the Roy Halladays of the world but is fine against Joel Pineiro may still be able to put up good or even great numbers on the whole (and for a lot of fantasy players, that final season line is all that matters). After all, they’re already playing in the majors and will be facing plenty of Pineiros.

Of course, this kind of thing could limit a player’s upside and definitely could have implications for major-league clubs. After all, if a player struggles against top-notch pitching, he’d certainly be a candidate to be examined more closely and may benefit from putting some extra work with the team’s hitting coach and player development staff. A team could also choose to deploy a player differently, sitting him out some games, if they know he struggles against top pitching.

All said, take the data itself with a grain of salt, but it does raise some interesting points and certainly gives us something to think about.