What does plate discipline tell us?
how often a hitter swings and makes contact with certain kind of pitches.
it also tells us how often a pitcher induces a hitters to sing of make contact on certain kind of pitches
What does Plate Discipline Numbers Mean to Us?
These numbers are very useful for determining the type of hitter or pitcher at which you’re looking and changes in these numbers can often be indicative of underlying changes in a player’s approach.
Plate Discipline Formulas:
O-Swing% = Swings at pitches outside the zone / pitches outside the zone
- This tells us a Chase Rate. How often does and batter swing at a pitch that is not a strike.
Z-Swing% = Swings at pitches inside the zone / pitches inside the zone
- What percentage does a batter swing at strikes.
Swing% = Swings / Pitches
- What percentage does a batter swing at pitches.
O-Contact% = Number of pitches on which contact was made on pitches outside the zone / Swings on pitches outside the zone
For hitters this doesn’t tell the entire story. Some batters are just aggressive on the first pitch not being selective at the beginning of the at-bat.
Plate Discipline Contact Rate
Contact Rate– Total Pitches Where Contact Was Made / Total Swings
- contact rate has fallen every season since 2011.
What are Good Plate Discipline Numbers?
Stat Average
O-Swing 30%
Z-Swing 65%
Swing 46%
O-Contact 66%
Z-Contact 87%
Contact 80%
Zone 45%
F-Strike 59%
SwStr 9.5%
Pitchers Rates
Z-Contact% = Number of pitches on which contact was made on pitches inside the zone / Swings on pitches inside the zone
Zone% = Pitches in the strike zone / Total pitches
F-Strike% = First pitch strikes / PA
SwStr% = Swings and misses / Total pitches
Check out our Sabermetrics and Analytics Library at Baseball Spotlight.
About the author– Tom Knuppel has been writing about baseball and sports for a few decades. As an avid St. Louis Cardinals fan he began with the blog CardinalsGM. Tom is a member of the United Cardinals Bloggers and the Baseball Bloggers Alliance. He also maintains the History of Cardinals website. More recently he has been busy at KnupSolutions and the primary writer of many sports at KnupSports and adds content at Sports 2.0. Tom is a retired High School English and Speech teacher and has completed over one hundred sportsbook reviews. He also can be followed on Twitter at tknup.
Feel free to contact Tom at tknuppel@gmail.com
