Plunk Everyone

Tim Hudson’s three plunk game last Friday, against the Angels, moved him past Kenny Rogers in the all time standings for hit batters in interleague games. Here’s a list of the pitchers who have hit the most batters in interleague games, through May 22, 2011:
Tim Hudson – 17
Kenny Rogers – 15
Ryan Rupe – 14
Tim Wakefield – 14
Carlos Zambrano – 14
Scott Sullivan – 13
Byung-Hyun Kim – 13
John Lackey – 13
Derek Lowe – 13
Ryan Dempster – 13
Miguel Batista – 11
Pedro Martinez – 11
Kevin Millwood – 11
Jeff Suppan – 11
Randy Wolf – 11
Aaron Sele – 10
Carl Pavano – 10
Greg Maddux – 10
Darren Oliver – 10
Ramon Ortiz – 10
Vicente Padilla – 10
Livan Hernandez – 10
A.J. Burnett – 10
Tom Glavine – 10

Nobody broke the batting HBP record for interleague plunks over the weekend, but here’s that list anyway:
Jason Kendall – 22
Jason Giambi – 19
Carlos Delgado – 18
Craig Biggio – 17
Derek Jeter – 17
Scott Rolen – 17
Melvin Mora – 16
Alex Rodriguez – 15
Aaron Rowand – 15
Miguel Tejada – 15
Juan Pierre – 14
Kevin Millar – 13
Aaron Boone – 13
Mike Redmond – 12
Torii Hunter – 12
Jose Guillen – 12
Jerry Hairston – 12
Mike Lieberthal – 12
Jason LaRue – 11
Barry Bonds – 11
Marlon Byrd – 11
Jeff Cirillo – 11
Jeff Bagwell – 11
David DeJesus – 11
Alex Cora – 11
Mark Teixeira – 11
Larry Walker – 11
Rickie Weeks – 10
Eric Young – 10
Fernando Tatis – 10
David Eckstein – 10
Jonny Gomes – 10
Luis Gonzalez – 10
Andres Galarraga – 10
Miguel Cairo – 10
Jeff Kent – 10
Andruw Jones – 10
Placido Polanco – 10

League wide plunk rates are down again this year, with batters getting hit about once every 127 plate appearances, compared to one per 119.8 plate appearances last year (for the full year). This is the 5th consecutive year that the plunk rate has dropped, but I still don’t understand why this would be so, since it’s so easy to show that getting hit by pitches leads to winning. It could be that pitchers have caught on to this, and are taking greater care to not hit opposing batters, but the batters need to adjust and get those HBP rates up again. Here’s why – this year teams have won 59.5% of games in which they get at least 1 HBP, and they’ve won only 46.7% of games in which they don’t get hit by any pitches.

The team with the biggest win percentage swing between games when they get hit by pitches and games when they don’t belongs to the Mets. They win at a .857 clip when they get hit by pitches, but have a dismal .417 record when they don’t. Unfortunately, they don’t take advantage of this – they’ve only been plunked in 7 games, and are currently on a 20 game plunkless streak*.

23 out of 30 major league teams have a winning record in games when they get hit by at least one pitch, and only 6 teams have a worse winning percentage when they get hit by a pitch than when they don’t. The Astros are slightly better when they get hit by a pitch, but they’re bad enough that the HBP help doesn’t get them over .500. The Mariners are the worst team at turning plunks into victory – they fall from a .486 win percentage when they remain un-plunked to a .286 win percentage when they do get hit by pitches.

Here’s the league standings, in order of win percentage in games with at least 1 HBP (along with their records in 0 plunk games, and overall records).

*(The Mets are actually 11-9 in their current 20 game plunkless streak, but who’s counting?)

Of the 4,125 pitches thrown yesterday, only 11 of them hit a batter, and only one of them hit Reed Johnson for his 107th career plunk.  That puts Johnson into a logjam at 60th place on the all time HBP list, tied with Pete Rose, Jason LaRue, and Wally Schang.  Johnson is now tied for 2nd place in National League plunks this year, with 5.  Prince Fielder and Ben Francisco also have 5 plunks this year, and Danny Espinosa still leads the NL with 7.

Carlos Pena got hit by a pitch against the Marlins, and that was the 50th time the Cubs have been plunked by Marlins pitchers.  Cubs pitchers have hit the Marlins 74 times, but they didn’t add to that total yesterday.

Alexei Ramirez got his 7th career HBP last night, but it was the 2nd time he’s been hit by Indians pitcher Fausto Carmona.   Both teams’ shortstops were plunked in the first inning of that game, with Asdrubal Cabrera being hit by Gavin Floyd.  US Cellular Field is now up to 995 HBPs in park history.

I was just reading the Sweetspot blog on espn, and noticed that it’s probably a good time to talk about home run difficulty ratings, so maybe people will stop flipping out about Jose Bautista, and whether he’s going to break the home run record, and whether it means he’s on PEDs or something. ‘Cause he might just be running up his home run numbers against pitchers who give up a lot of homers, but we wouldn’t notice that, would we, because we treat every home run equally. Which is kind of silly, given that we have the data to do better in this day and age. We have websites that tell us how much break each curveball had in every game, but we still go around thinking hitting a homer off Roy Halladay and hitting a homer off Colby Lewis should count the same when we’re trying to project for the rest of the season. Sure, they both count as one in the home run total, but if you’re going to look at someone’s home runs part way through the year and project it through the rest of the season, it might be a good idea to consider whether or not he’s likely to face the same quality of pitching for the rest of the year. And when you factor in the quality of pitchers Bautista has homered off so far this year, he’s not really far out of line with the rest of the league leaders.

So this looks like a job for Home Run Equivalent Difficulty. Here’s the top 10 this year:

So yeah, Jose Bautista is having a great season – 16 home runs. But only 5 of them have been against pitchers who prevent home runs at better than the league average rate per plate appearance. Major League pitchers are giving up homers about once every 43.1 plate appearances this year, but the best pitcher Bautista has homered off only gives up a homer every 50.6 plate appearances (David Price -though Bautista did get 2 off him). He’s hit homers off James Hoey (14.7 bf per HR), Colby Lewis (18.3 bf per HR – 12 homers allowed to lead the AL), Joe Nathan (20.6 bf per HR), Freddy Garcia (26 bf per HR), and AJ Burnett (26.1 bf per HR). In all, half of Bautista’s homers have been hit against pitchers who give up homers at least 50% more often than the major league average. He still hit them though – so he’s still having an awesome season – but it seems like if he’s hit this many homers against homer-prone pitchers, he might be spending more time facing easier pitching now than he will for the rest of the season.

*- HRed is calculated by taking each home run, calculating the rate of batters faced per home run allowed for the pitcher who gave it up, dividing that by the league average, and adding them all up.   So his homer against Colby Lewis is only worth about .4 homers against average pitching, the way I figure it.  And, his 16 homers are only equal to about 12.6 homers against average pitchers.  These numbers are all subject to change though – any of those pitchers who looks like they give up a lot of homers right now might drastically improve by the end of the season, and maybe the feat of homering off Colby Lewis will look more difficult.  And of course maybe Bautista will continue to get enough chances against pitchers who give up a lot of homers to continue his home run pace and crank out 65.  I’m not saying that can’t happen.  I’m just saying the 16 he has so far were hit off relatively easy pitchers to homer against.

Also, he’s only got 1 HBP this year, so he’s clearly doing something wrong based on that alone.