JD Drew the Statue
Could someone please tell JD Drew that baseball players have to swing the bat everyone once in a while to get a hit? He came up as the go ahead run in the 8th inning, finally facing off against a right handed pitcher since Pettitte was finally out. Here was his chance to come up big in the clutch! And there were literally a half dozen of his close family members around Red Sox Nation that actually thought he would do it!
Fortunately, my last name is not Drew, so I was not one of those people with false hope that JD Statue was all of a sudden going to be an aggressive hitter against a 99MPH fastball throwing rookie. Now that wouldn’t make any sense would it? I, in a room of 13 other Red Sox fans, declared that “He will watch at least 4 pitches go by before swinging. In fact, I’ll make 4 the over-under and I’ll take the over.” Yes, just about everyone in the room thought I’d be wrong (In spite of predicting Youkilis to see 7 pitches as the first batter up - which he did exactly). And sure enough, what did we see?
Called Strike 1
Ball 1
Called Strike 2
Ball 2 (same location as strike 2, too close to be taking)
Ball 3 (still too close for comfort)
And of course, a check swing at a borderline pitch for Strike 3. Way to play for the walk there JD Screwed.
This isn’t the first time he’s done this either! With the game on the line last Sunday against the Angels, he was called on to pinch hit for Bobby Kielty, again with the game on the line in the 8th inning and the tying runs online. And guess how many pitches he swung at during that at bat? Yup, none. He stood there and watched 6 pitches go right by him without as much as flinching. Again, this is off a right handed fastball pitcher - just the situation you want him in! In this case, it was former Blue Jay Justin Speier, who gets it up around 96-97 effectively and throws a lot of fastballs. Exactly the kind of pitcher you’d like to hit a home run off of!
But this is just two examples, right? Maybe my memory is selective and I’m just trying to prove my own theory right. Well, let’s look at the career numbers, before he came to Boston. Thanks to the Baseball Analysts, much of the digging is done for us for the 2005 season. He only played in half the games, but its still a large enough sample to count.
The average player, for the sake of perspective, sees 3.75 pitcher per appearance. They take a ball 36.7% of the time and take a strike 17% of the time. This means that a normal hitter should be swinging, more or less, at 50% of all pitches he sees. You can see where this is going.
JD Drew, in the two examples I gave, swung (if you can call it that) at 1 out of 12 pitches. Even if that was a rarity and he usually swings three times as much, that means he is still taking 25% more pitches than most. In our data set from 2005, JD Drew took the 5th most pitches for balls (43.4% of all pitches thrown, he took for balls), while seeing the fewest total pitches out of the top 10 taker (he saw only 3.88 pitches per plate appearance). Yes, he sees less pitches than most players, and still swings less. And we wonder why his home run total is down. Guys who have good plate discipline typically foul a lot of pitches off to get in hitters counts (Youk, Manny, Ortiz), not just sit there and wait for the pitcher to deal one right down the middle.
This is a case where Sabermetrics and MoneyBall theory are just plain wrong. The guy has a good OBP and has a high hits/contact rate, but that is mostly becuase he just watches the pitches go by, not because he is the above-average hitter everyone thinks he is.
I guess my friend from Atlanta was right, when he told me “Man, you are really going to hate JD Drew.” Indeed I do - now prove me wrong and do something already! I don’t want to call you JD Screwed anymore!
Stumble it!