The Tony Gwynn Treatment

Do low-strikeout hitters get a smaller called zone from the umpires? Earlier this season, Brian Anderson, veteran lefty and current Rays color man, made that assertion. While Tampa Bay’s first baseman, James Loney, battled through a pitcher’s count, Anderson said:

James Loney [is] getting the Tony Gwynn treatment: If he takes it, it must be a ball. He’s not going to take strike three.”

First, let’s agree: Few have hit like Tony Gwynn. Since 1913, the furthest back we have strikeout-rate data (i.e. both Ks and plate appearances in the books), only 171 of 3,151 qualified hitters have struck out in fewer than five percent of their plate appearances. That’s just five percent of major league careers in that span. Since 1950, only 21 players have been under a five percent K rate. Since 1970, just seven.

In many respects, Tony Gwynn was a player from a different era. He produced lots of contact, lots of doubles, lots of steals, and few home runs. His out-of-time-ness presents a bit of a problem. The best tool we have for attempting to measure a possible “Tony Gwynn Treatment” is PITCHf/x, which did not exist before 2007 and was not terribly reliable in those first few seasons.

Since 2009, we have just five regular players who posted a K rate under eight percent.

Hitters With <8% K%, 2009-2014

Hitter	Total Edge Pitches	Career wRC+	Career K%
Juan Pierre	722	86	5.8%
Placido Polanco	563	96	6.8%
Jeff Keppinger	507	92	6.8%
Jason Kendall	272	99	7.9%
David Eckstein	265	92	7.3%
Total	2,329	93	6.9%

These are the only five players relatively close to Gwynn’s contact majesty–and they aren’t even under five percent. Is the eight-percent mark an arbitrary position along the K-rate spectrum? Yes, and we can work around that in a little bit. But let’s begin our investigation here, with these five. We should note, too, that not only do these gents lack the Gwynn K-rate, they also lack Gwynn’s complete hitting talent (132 wRC+).

We will conduct our investigation at the vertical edges of the strike zone. Because we are dealing with different player heights-–not only across our sample, but across the league-–we will narrow our examination heights to higher than the typical bottom and lower than the typical top of the zone. Chopping a few inches off, we get this:

The trick here is that we cannot look at right- and left-handed and switch-hitters equally. Why? Because of the phenomenon known as the “lefty strike.” The lefty strike, as detailed by Matthew Carruth, would make our edge examination biased against left-handed hitters.

So let’s start by comparing our Neo-Gwynn righties — the five hitters listed above, minus the left-handed-hitting Juan Pierre — against the rest of the the righties in the league:

Called Strike Rate, Right-Handed Batter Groups

Group	Called Strike Rate
Neo-Gwynn Righties	43.5%
All Righties with At Least 150 Edge Pitches	45.5%

Well, how about we add a few more lefties to the Neo-Gwynn group? To Juan Pierre’s 55.5 percent edge-called strike rate, let’s add a few more sub-10-percent K-rate hitters, namely: Ichiro Suzuki (9.8 percent K-rate), Casey Kotchman (9.9 percent), Ben Revere (9.2 percent) and Nori Aoki (8.0 percent). This gives us five Neo-Gwynn lefties to compare to the rest of the league:

Called Strike Rate, Left-Handed Batter Groups

Group	Called Strike Rate
Neo-Gwynn Lefties	57.3%
All Lefties with At Least 150 Edge Pitches	59.4%

Our Neo-Gwynn lefties are getting about one out of every 50 edge strikes called in their favor — nearly the same difference our righties group got. But could this just be a matter random variation? Just one in 50 edge pitches is not much, especially considering the likes of, say, A.J. Pierzynski having just 507 such qualified pitches since 2009.

We can test our sample’s superior edge rate in a variety of ways. Let’s start by looking at the opposite end of the spectrum. Do high-K-rate hitters get penalized on the edge?

Edge Called Strike Rate

Edge Called Strike Rate

Group	RHB	LHB
The 10 Highest K-rates	44.9%	55.5%
The 10 Lowest K-rates	40.0%	59.3%

Uh oh! Suddenly the data are not behaving like we might expect from the Tony Gwynn Treatment. Here, our high-K, left-handed hitters are getting the smaller strike rate. We’d expect the low-K lefties to receive the favorable zone that their low-K righty brethren appear to be receiving.

But here’s the other catch: The Low-K Lefties combine for a 93 wRC+ while the High-K group has a 110 wRC+. Moreover, the Low-K lefties walked at a 7.3 percent rate, while the High-K lefties walked in 10.6 percent of plate appearances. Maybe this group (headlined by Jack Cust, Chris Davis and Adam Dunn) just got a little more respect from the umpires.

This brings in the second component to Tony Gwynn’s greatness: He rarely struck out because he was a great hitter. No offense to Juan Pierre, but I believe his strikeout rate is low because he cannot afford to play the patience game with pitchers. They know he and Ben Revere are going to hit the ball for power only if the planets are aligned and the House and Senate are both in session and gravity is having a bad day. These guys are slap hitters. Tony Gwynn was a doubles hitter. His gap power enabled him to have patience, too.

So what if we look at the hitters who also packed a wallop? Considering only hitters with both a 100 or better wRC+ (so above average offensively) and below 15-percent K-rate (a below-average K-rate), we get 30 hitters with an average edge-strike rate of 44.3 percent. That’s a little lower than average, but again, it’s just barely below the average. And that’s the problem. Though our Neo-Gwynn groups have lower strike rates, they are still all within one standard deviation of the average:

And though our investigation has focused on the matter of low-K specialists, we see this lack of spread and lack of relationship continued throughout the entirety of the data:

Does this mean it’s all just noise? Maybe. The regressions above indicate that K rate (which proved to be the strongest variable in any multi-input regression I ran) has only a 0.5 percent correlation (a 0.005 R-squared) with the variations in the data. That’s not much. In fact, it’s downright miniscule.

Does this mean there is no special preference given to low-K hitters? Maybe, but remember: We’re looking at just tiny slivers of the strike zone in just a tiny sliver of baseball’s timeline. It’s safer to say: Yes, there appears to be a tiny degree of favoritism applied to the most elite contact hitters, but in general, a K rate will not determine the width of the strike zone.