Plunk Everyone

It's a fairly common cliche in baseball that a 162 game season is "a marathon, not a sprint". The point being that it's a long season and teams have to pace themselves to play the full schedule and be at their best all season long. It's inevitable that players will tire as the season goes on. This is one of the reasons people got obsessed with pitch counts sometime during the 90s, and teams seem to have experimented with give certain pitchers "vacation" DL stints in mid-july to keep them fresh for September and if they're lucky, October. Meanwhile, batters have adapted by seeming taking more pitches, being more patient at the plate at trying to wear down pitchers. And team GM's have countered that by rotating an increasing number of arms through major league rosters to throw more pitches without wearing out key pitchers. 615 different players have pitched this season, so MLB is well on it's way toward breaking it's 2007 record of 666 pitchers used. The Angels might be the first team ever to have more players pitch for them than bat for them in a season. This just leads to batters trying even harder to take more pitches and wear down pitchers, and one of the main ways to do that is by hitting a lot of foul balls.

There are a couple of side effects though - lots of study has been done about pitchers wearing down based on the number of pitches they throw, but you don't hear about how many times a batter can swing a bat before they start having trouble in a game, or in a season (though I've looked into this and hope to write about it as some point). And, all that base running can really get to people too - and not just Chien-Ming Wang. And the problem with batters hitting a lot of foul balls is that a lot of times there are guys on base, running with the pitch, expecting the batter to hit the ball someplace useful who have to go all the way back to their base when the ball goes foul. That has to get tiring after a while. For example, on July 21st Mike Napoli fouled off 5 consecutive pitches in an 11 pitch at-bat while Kendry Morales was trying to run from 1st to 2nd on each of them. Albert Pujols did the same thing on April 27th, but he had two guys on base - Brian Barden and Rick Ankiel (who had just been plunked). I'm sure Barden really enjoyed running wind-sprints between 2nd and 3rd while Pujols stood around shooting balls into the stands. Hey Albert, just hit one out so we can have a leisurely jog, how about that? (It's not clear from the play by play accounts if both runners were going, just that at least one of them was).

So far this year, nobody has fouled off more than 5 pitches with runners going, but back on August 19, 2007, Cory Sullivan of the Dodgers fouled off 11 consecutive pitches, all with Yorvit Torealba running on the play. Last seasons's worst incident was Kelly Johnson fouling off 8 pitches with the runners going - with the bases loaded.

So who are the worst offenders this year, making their teammates run back and forth while they selfishly foul off pitches waiting for one that meets their standards to hit in the right direction?
Here's the top 10 in 2009 foul balls hit with runners going:
Orlando Hudson - 20
Albert Pujols - 18
Jorge Cantu - 17
Emilio Bonifacio - 16
Nick Johnson - 15
Kosuke Fukudome - 14
Scott Rolen - 13
Placido Polanco - 13
Ryan Theriot - 13
David Ortiz - 13

Only 10 of Pujols' 18 fouls with runners going were in 2-out situations, which might make a runner wonder, those 8 other times, why he was being told to go when it would be so much easier to sit down on the base and relax and watch Albert hit one over the fence. Jason Giambi led this category last year with 25 fouls with runners going, and Todd Helton has done it the most in recent history with 26 in 2005.

I think it would be logical to assume that teams that are doing all this extra running are going to be more tired at the end of the year (though I may use the word "logical" differently than most people). So, here are the team by team totals for the year:
Dodgers - 103
Tigers - 91
Marlins - 81
Natinals - 81
Cubs - 78
Giants - 77
Rockies - 76
Royals - 73
Angels - 69
Pirates - 69
Twins - 67
Blue Jays - 66
Cardinals - 65
Yankees - 63
Rays - 62
White Sox - 61
Reds - 58
Astros - 58
Indians - 57
A's - 57
Mets - 55
Brewers - 54
Padres - 54
Phillies - 52
Mariners - 51
Orioles - 50
Rangers - 49
Red Sox - 47
Braves - 43
Diamondbacks - 41

Now obviously it would be a better measure of fatigue if we knew how many runners were running on each incident, but the data doesn't quite support that. But if there's clubhouse strife caused by all this unnecessary running, at least we can see which teams have had the most of it. In the past 4 seasons, no team has won the world series after hitting more than 105 foul balls with runners going.


Casey Blake is the only batter this season to foul off 2 pitches with the runners going and then get hit by a pitch. No one else this year has gotten plunked after more than 1 foul with runners going.

Labels: foul ball friday