Atlanta Braves hitting trends: Dansby Swanson

We’re told that baseball is a sport of constant adjustment. Hitters change in response to how they are pitched and pitchers change in response to the success of hitters against them. The data are never ‘final’, but let’s see how a few key Atlanta Braves hitters are faring.

This is the beginning of a brief series to look in at the data collected about pitch choices and plate discipline for three young Atlanta Braves stars:  Dansby Swanson, Ozzie Albies, and Ronald Acuna Jr.

We’ll be looking at results – not swing type, not change in the mechanics, but much more about the changes of how well each player is reacting to the manner in which pitchers are trying to get them out.

Most of the data herein will be derived from fangraphs, and from a single source within those pages since they themselves present multiple opinions on pitch types and such.

This treatment won’t be universally “complete” – that’s regrettable, but the space required for such an endeavor would be enormous – but it should show us trends that we can watch for.

Within the Baselines

A good starting point is the averages… the average rates for various plate discipline parameters across the league.

As fangraphs notes, these values do change from year-to-year… as does the strike zone, for that matter. But since we’ll be checking multiple years of data, let’s go with some rough averages since 2016 for these metrics:

• OSwing% – the percentage of pitches swung at that are out of the strike zone.
  • This is trending higher and 2019 was at the highest rate (31.6%) recorded;
  • Average: 30.7%
• ZSwing% – same, but for pitches that are strikes.
  • Trending higher after a nadir in the 2010-12 seasons;
  • 2019 saw a large jump;
  • Average: 67.3%
• OContact% – OSwing, except that you hit the ball.
  • Highest rate came in 2011 (68%);
  • trending flat lately
  • Average: 63.1%
• ZContact% – The best discipline point: the rate of making contact on pitches in the zone.
  • League-wide, it’s been fairly consistent over the years measured (since 2002);
  • Average: 85.6%

Clearly, the best (and most impossible) outcome is that a batter always makes contact on every ball in the strike zone he swings at and never swings at balls that aren’t strikes.  It might be an arguable point that having a 100% ZSwing rate isn’t a great idea, but we’ll table that discussion for … a while.

Accepting these as the goals, let’s see how these hitters are faring… at least as compared to the averages and their own personal trends.  Today we’ll start with the player that we have the most data on:  Dansby Swanson.