First-Pitch Swinging is Good, but for Who?

Image credit: © Nick Turchiaro-USA TODAY Sports

Last November, Patrick Dubuque examined how players perform against the first pitch of a plate appearance. The results showed how hitters can create more runs by swinging in those opportunities. “More” is a relative term. Technically speaking, it’s the fifth-most valuable count for a hitter. Of course, the catch is that in all the counts that are more valuable, batters can’t get there alone. They exist in degrees of uncertainty⁠—3-0, 3-1, 2-0, 1-0⁠—revealed one mistake at a time by the pitcher or umpire, or, perhaps even more difficult, requiring discipline from a hitter that can be fleeting. Arguably, this leaves the first pitch of a plate appearance as the one with which a hitter can dictate action more than any other.

We’re beyond the point where we’d apply blanket strategic advice, if ever there was such a time. It’s not helpful to simply say hitters should start swinging at the first pitch with more frequency because it leads to more offense. The way the game works is cosmic. One action works in conjunction with another, whether we know it ahead of time or not. A single action catches on and causes an adjustment, and then that adjustment requires its own adjustment, and so on and so forth until we wear out cyclic existence and we’re all enlightened (okay, maybe not, but… maybe?). Still, players are swinging more at the first pitch they see in general.

The first two weeks of a given season are included here for a couple reasons. For one, they’re all we have to work with so far in 2024. For another, it helps show how quickly a league-wide approach can settle in, and how the sheer number of players doing something at one time can cut down the wait time it takes to establish a useful sample size. If the trend holds, batters will be swinging at the first pitch they see somewhere near 32% of the time at the end of this season.

League-wide trends are good for a bird’s eye view of a situation but can’t speak to how they’re created. They’re like a flashlight being able to brighten an area of a room but being unable to shine on itself. The thing to remember is that what is happening generally is not being shaped by every single player equally. Right now, there are a lot of guys swinging a ton more at the first pitch. If you’re into giant-size Man-Thing tables of year-over-year comparative data, you can check it out here. But the important thing to know is that, right now, 49 players are swinging at the first pitch they see this season at least 10% more than they did in 2023. If we reduce it to just 5%, the number goes up to 84. It regards anyone who has seen at least 100 pitches so far this season and saw at least 750 last year, which lets us account for most anyone of interest from late-season call-ups and platoon guys to everyday regulars.

It’s a big number, driven by the way stats can become skewed early in the season whether by explicit attack plan or the serendipity of matchups. But it’s also illustrative in another way. If you test drive a car correctly, you drive it like it’s already yours. It can be the same way for a player trying a new approach. It can also begin to feel like blanket advice is not only being given but getting applied, though. So how useful could it be?

Only two players in the league last year ended up swinging at the first pitch 10% more (or higher) than they did in 2022: Jorge Polanco and Brendan Donovan. Both saw their run production go down on those pitches. If we ease the threshold to swinging at the first pitch by 5% more than the year before, it still only accounts for 26 players. In total, only 11 of them saw their offensive production increase in that situation. Of that group, four of them still finished below average when it came to their wOBA against the first pitch. For the most part, these guys were not worldbeaters. The best of the bunch, Taylor Ward and Teoscar Hernandez, each had a 113 DRC+. No one else had better than a 102 (Amed Rosario) and everyone else was under 100.

If we do the same exercise for the 2021-22 seasons, we get just 19 players who swung at least 5% more at the first pitch from one season to the next. Seven of them improved their run production in 0-0 counts: Yoan Moncada, Joey Gallo, Cedric Mullins, Matt Olson, Nicky Lopez, Xander Bogaerts, and Ryan Jeffers. As in 2023, many of these guys were not especially good hitters in the aggregate. Only Olson (122) and Bogaerts (119) registered a DRC+ better than 92 for the year.

However, some of the players who are making the most consequential gains in this context for 2024 are big names: Elly De La Cruz, Mookie Betts, Adolis Garcia. Others are ones who have been painfully deliberate, like Seiya Suzuki or Ke’Bryan Hayes. Many, however, have been closer to platoon players or utility guys who are trying to take advantage of the situation before them, like Orlando Arcia, Josh Smith, Brandon Marsh, and Jose Caballero. They won’t all maintain their newfound eagerness but they provide a smattering of guys to keep an eye on.

One thing to remember is that the players who have swung at the first pitch more often, but closer to the rate they swung at it in the year before, have been the ones who have had more success. It could be reinforcing an aspect of modern player development in how it focuses so much on a player finding the right degree of aggression. It could also indicate that the best hitters don’t need to jump at the first pitch they see, but take cuts at the ones they can do damage on the same way they would in any count. For most guys, it’s a way to leverage a plate appearance that they only get one shot at.