Washington may have been first in war, first in peace, and last in the American League, but boy could those Senators sing. “This game of baseball is only one-half skill. The other half is something else. Something bigger,” proclaimed the fictional Sens skipper of the 1955 musical (and 1958 movie) Damn Yankees, just before bursting into song: “you gotta have heart!” The singing Senators weren’t entirely wrong, but they missed one crucial point: everyone’s got a heart. So the question isn’t one of having
heart, it’s one of what you do with your heart. Heart of the plate, that is.
Baseball Savant divides the area of the plate into four “Attack Regions”, as seen here:
Let’s focus on the heart of the plate. That’s where the meatiest meatballs are served up, the juiciest offerings, the most tempting morsels. But not every player uses the heart of the plate equally. Some are better than others at recognizing when the pitch is heading towards the heart of things, and better at punishing pitchers who reach out and try to touch their heart. Baseball Savant measures this by calculating each hitter’s run value for pitches thrown in the heart zone (their definition of run value being as follows: “Every pitch is assigned a run value based on its outcome (ball, strike, home run, etc.). The sum of all of a player’s contributions across a season, or multiple seasons, measures his overall batting or pitching run value”).
So we can see which Phillies are best and worst at turning pitches over the heart of the plate into runs. And if we do, we find the following (using context-neutral run value, meaning we don’t take the base and out situation into account): Kyle Schwarber is the best at it, with a run value in the heart region of +26, behind only Aaron Judge league-wide. And Bryson Stott is the least likely to turn pitches in the heart region into runs, with a -14 (in other words, his swing decisions for pitches in that region are costing the team runs).
Let’s take a closer look at Stott’s swing decisions by region and their impact on run value: (All numbers prior to Tuesday’s game).
Baseball Savant breaks this down further by runs added or subtracted by swing and take decisions within the heart region. And so we can see that Stott’s -14 run value there is the result both of swinging and taking: Stott isn’t terribly good at doing damage with the heart region pitches he swings at, and he lets too many hittable pitches there go by. But the latter issue is the worse of the two: he loses eleven runs with his takes, and just three with his swings. This isn’t surprising: Stott is an extremely patient hitter, swinging at just 39.6% of pitches this season, and 54.9% of pitches in the strike zone. Only eight qualified batters swing less often overall. And only one— the Angels’ Taylor Ward— is less likely to swing at pitches in the strike zone. So it tracks that he loses a lot of run value by not swinging at pitches in the heart region.
And the story with Kyle Schwarber should track too: he’s really, really good at knowing which pitches to swing at, and then doing immense amounts of damage when he does swing. So there shouldn’t be anything surprising about his run value in the heart region being so high.
But there is something surprising about it.
Schwarber’s overall run value in the heart region is +26, but when we break that down by swing runs and take runs, we see that only his swings are adding positive value there. His take decisions have cost him eleven runs—the exact number that Stott’s takes have cost him. Schwarber is most famous for his prodigious (I might even say ludicrous) power, but he’s also notable for an exceedingly selective approach at the plate. He’s swinging at 41.4% of pitches overall this season, not much more than Stott (though there’s a somewhat bigger gap in zone swing percentage, where Schwarber posts a 63.2% to Stott’s 54.9%). So Schwarber loses as much run value in the heart region with takes as Stott does. Nevertheless, he’s at the top of the overall heart region run value leaderboard among the Phils, while Stott is at the bottom. Why? Well, his (and here, the only word that will do is ludicrous) +37 swing runs. There are not many comparisons in which Shohei Ohtani looks like a slouch, but this is one of them: Schwarber leads him by five runs added in the heart region.
Schwarber and Stott may have lost equal numbers of runs with their take decisions, but it should be noted they aren’t equally likely to take over the heart of the plate. Stott allows 41% of pitches in the heart region to pass him by, whereas Schwarber only allows 32% to do the same. Since the two have equal numbers of runs lost with their takes in the same region, it must mean that Schwarber’s takes are, while less frequent than Stott’s, on average more detrimental. That may be the result of Stott’s skill at avoiding strikeouts: he Ks just 17.4% of the time, whereas Schwarber does so 26.7% of the time. It’s plausible that Schwarber, being far more strikeout prone than Stott overall, has more takes that become called third strike over the heart of the plate than Stott does. And as those takes would be among the most damaging that one can, well, take, that would explain why Schwarber has lost as many heart zone runs via take as Stott despite having fewer takes overall. Unfortunately, data on strikeouts looking by region is niche enough that not even Baseball Savant has it (or it’s buried so deep that I just missed it; always a possibility with the Library of Abner-xandria that is Savant), so this remains conjectural. We do have data on the total number of looking strikeouts each has: Schwarber has a lower percentage of his Ks looking than Stott, but a greater overall number of them: 30 for him, 19 for Stott. But it’s safe to assume that not all of those 11 extra Ks for Schwarber are on pitches over the heart of the plate, so this isn’t hard proof of the hypothesis.
There wouldn’t seem to be a lot of similarities between Stott and Schwarber as batters. Schwarber swings his bat with tremendous speed, and Stott’s moves at a molasses-like pace. Nobody in baseball has a higher hard-hit percentage than Schwarber; all but nine hitters have higher hard-hit percentages than Stott. But in their usage of the heart of the plate— and more precisely, in the patience and occasional passiveness that informs it— they’re brothers in arms.
