On Neil Walker and plate discipline

It’s been noted several times by Pirates fans – and most eloquently by Matt Bandi over at Pittsburgh Lumber Co – that Neil Walker’s success thus far has rested on an unsustainably high BABIP, and that if he doesn’t start taking walks he’s not going to stay useful for very long.

I’m not here to argue against that. Walker has had a low walk rate for most of his pro career, and it’s largely what has held him back to this point. Him taking more walks in AAA this year led to him hitting better overall and earning the call to the Majors.

That trend has not continued in the Major Leagues, though, as Walker has drawn only 11 walks since coming up, good for a 5.4% rate. If that rate is maintained, he’s likely to regress just like Matt said.

Something I’m interested in looking at, though, is whether there’s any hope that Walker will start drawing walks again.

Looking at his plate discipline data at FanGraphs, I think there’s reason to believe that the walks will come.

According to FanGraphs, Walker swings at pitches out of the strike zone 29.1% of the time. That sounds like a lot, but the league average is 28.9%, so there’s only a 0.2% difference there. As far as making contact with those outside pitches, he does it 73.5% of the time, presumably fouling off most of those to keep the AB going. The league average is 66.5%. And finally, his swinging strike percentage is 8% as compared to the league average of 8.4%.

So in all discipline categories that involve pitches out of the strike zone (and thus balls, assuming the ump doesn’t blow the call) Walker is around or better than the league average at handling those pitches.

The strikes against him are the following: He swings at pitches in the zone a bit more often than the league average (66.7% to 64.3%). It’s possible that some of those are borderline pitches which would have been called balls had he held off. He also swings in general at more pitches than the average batter (46.7% to 45.5%).

If there’s one thing that stands out with Walker, it’s his percentage of first-pitch strikes. The first pitch against Walker has been a strike 63.4% of the time as compared to a 58.9% league average. I’ve not paid close enough attention to see if that’s because Walker swings through a lot of first pitches or if it’s just a statistical anomaly and Walker has taken more first pitch strikes than average hitters. If it’s the former, we have a problem. If it’s the latter, a regression is due.

Regardless of all this, taking walks is not about taking balls. It’s about taking ball four. Based on this data, I’d say Walker is due to start walking more. However, we’ll have to wait and see.

UPDATE: Matt has since taken this post and played with some more numbers that I wasn’t aware were available, and has come up with a triple-slash line based on what we should expect from Walker going forward. The results confirm my thoughts on Walker: he’s not going to keep hitting like a star, but if he plays good defense at second, he can hit well enough to stick around as an average player.