Plunk Everyone

Over on the right-hand side of this website, there's a leader board with a menu which readers can use to keep up to date on things like who's leading the league in getting hit by pitches on tuesdays, and which pitchers have hit the most batters when the count is 1 ball and 2 strikes (Roy Halladay and Braden Looper are tied at 4). But, if you look further down that menu and select the 3-0 count, you'll get nobody. This is not a data error - it's just a weird fact of the 2008 baseball season. Nobody in the Majors has been hit by a pitch on a 3-0 count.

Obviously not a lot of people want to stay in the way of a 3-0 pitch that's headed right for them, since it's going to be a ball anyway, resulting in a free pass whether it hits the batter or not. But that same logic exists on 3-1 and 3-2 counts, we've had 48 plunks this season with those counts. But none on 3-0. 11 batters got hit on 3-0 counts last season. Chase Utley got hit by 3-0 pitches twice in 2006. It's not a common outcome, but it does happen - except this year.

Maybe there just haven't been as many 3-0 counts this season? That might explain it. But for the 2005 through 2007 seasons combined, 4.4% of plate appearances started out with a 3-0 count. In 2008, it's been 4.5%, so there's been virtually no change in the frequency of 3-0 counts, and the percentage of plate appearance that end on the 4th pitch after 3 balls is nearly identical this year to the combined total of the last three seasons.

Batters are also swinging their bats about as often this season as they have for the past three. You'll see a batter swing at a 3-0 pitch in only 6.9% of the times that count comes up. This year they're putting the 3-0 pitch in play slightly more often - 1.5% more often, but that's barely enough to notice. Swinging strikes on 3-0 counts are down 23%, so that's an improvement for batters, but the bigger change is the frequency of plate appearance where pitchers give up on the fourth pitch and throw an intentional ball. There have been 62 intentional walks this season that only turned intentional on the 4th pitch, after 3 balls un-intentional balls. The past 3 seasons have seen an average of just 74 instances of that pitchers bailing out with an intentional ball after getting behind 3-0. It's possible that these are the same situations that produced some of the plunks in the past - when the pitcher gets behind 3-0 to a good hitter, and he and his catcher decide a free pass is safer than attempting to hit the strikezone - but maybe this year they're going to the intentional walk instead of saying "let's just hit him".

There have only been 2 plunks this season on plate appearances that began with three consecutive balls - on April 26th, Jim Thome got ahead 3-0 against the Orioles Dennis Sarfate, but then whiffed on pitch 4, fouled off pitch 5, and got hit by pitch 6. On July 6th, Jeremy Hermida of the Marlins got ahead 3-0 against Rockies pitcher Cedrick Bowers, then took a called strike and got hit by an 89mph fastball. 3-1 counts have been the second most unpopular count to get plunked on this season, with a total of only 5. Only 13 batters have been hit by a pitch on a 2-0 count. On the other end of the list, 183 batters have been plunked on the first pitch of their plate appearances, and 165 have been hit with an 0-1 count.

439 of the 995 plunks taken by batters this season have come when the batter was behind in the count, compared to just 150 while the batter was ahead.