When I began to play baseball, coaches or senior players always told me to swing a baseball in the strike zone. And, don’t miss. Making contact is very important and even a weak contact could work because opponents might make mistakes in defense. However, things are not the same in Major League Baseball.
I went to check the statcast website and found something interesting. From 2008 to 2020, we can see that there’s been an upward trend in swings and misses in the strike zone. Swing & Miss % remained below 15% between 2008 and 2011. It went up to 15.4% in 2012 and remained below 16% for several years. In 2016, swing & miss percentage rose to 16.4% and increased to 17.6% in 2017. Last season, swing and miss percentage in the strike zone was 18.9%.
It seems that there are more and more swings and misses in the strike zone. Let’s try to dig deeper.
We might be familiar with the strike zone, which is divided into 9 regions. Let’s call zone 1 to zone 3 the top of the zone, zone 4 to zone 6 the middle of the zone and zone 7 to zone 9 the bottom of the strike zone.
In the top of the strike zone, there’s an obvious upward trend. Swing and miss percentage was below 16% in 2008 and 2009. Nonetheless, it went up to 16.3% in 2010. Between 2013 and 2014, swing and miss rate was above 18%. In 2015, swing and miss % increased to 20.5% and has been above 20% since then. It rose to 23.2% in 2019. Last season, swing and miss percentage in the top of the zone was nearly 25%.
In the middle of the strike zone, swing and miss rate remained around 11% between 2008 and 2011. But, it rose to 11.6% in 2012 and 2013. It fell back to 11.4% in 2014. In 2015 and 2016, swing and miss percentage in the middle of the strike zone was above 12%. Since 2017, Swing & miss % has remained above 13%. In the 2020 season, swing and miss percentage in the middle of the strike zone increased to 14.3%.
When looking at the bottom of the strike zone, things are a little bit different. In 2008, swing & miss rate in this zone was 18.8%. In 2019, it rose to 19.6%. However, swing & miss % remained below 18.5% from 2010 to 2012. In 2013, it increased to 19.1%, and then, in 2014, it dropped to 17.8%. As we can see, between 2014 and 2016, swing and miss rate in the bottom of the strike zone was below 18%. In 2017, it jumped to 21.1%. Nonetheless, it dropped to 18.9% in 2019. In the shortened 2020 season, swing and miss percentage in the bottom of the strike zone was 20%.
In the top of the strike zone and in the middle of the strike zone, it shows us that there’s an upward trend in swing and miss percentage. We see more swings and misses in these two zones and there might be some reasons behind. Are MLB pitchers more willing to attack the top of the strike zone? Does this outcome relate to the launch angle revolution? Are we going to see more swings and misses in the 2021 season, particularly in the top of the strike zone?
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