Pitch to the Dodgers

As you may be aware, the Dodgers are mired in a terrible slump. After posting a 56-11 record from June 7 to Aug 25, 2017, the Los Angeles NL franchise won just one game in their last 17 chances and lost eleven in a row. They have scored one run or less eight times in that slump, including the game they won. Look at the batters for the Dodgers during the hot streak. There were a high number of outstanding on-base percentages, and even the players with low OBPs were walking at a high rate. This struck a chord.

One of my theories about the poor post-season performance of the Oakland Athletics in the Moneyball era was that they were built around OBP, not batting average. Take away the walks from the A’s by putting pitches in the strike zone, and a team’s OBP will be reduced to it’s batting average. Do that to the Yankees of that era and you get a team that gets on base at a .290 clip. Do it to the A’s and they might get on base at a .240 clip. In the playoffs, teams usually have good pitching, so the A’s offense was deprived of an important offensive weapon, their walks.

So did teams start going after the Dodgers batters? Here are the batters over the last 17 games. Look at the bottom of the list, and the low BA players are not drawing that many walks. The BAs and the OBPs are much closer.

Overall, the Dodgers posted a .264/.353/.487 slash line during the hot streak. In the slump, they are at .201/.273/.320. So a 89 point spread between BA and OBP is down to 72 points. If someone has data on the opposition pitching more in the zone against the Dodgers lately, I’d love to see it. If teams adopted a strategy of, “Don’t worry about the home runs, limit walks,” it would seem to have more than the desired effect.

from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/2xvSUwg