One of my pet peeves in baseball is when an announcer mentions a stat without giving any context. It’s lazy and misleading and it’s usually done with counting stats. For example, both A.J. Pierzynski and Prince Fielder have grounded into 19 double plays this season, but Pierzynski has done it in 60 fewer opportunities. Opportunities are defined as plate appearances with a runner on first with less than two outs.
Why do opportunities need to be considered? Not all plate appearances are created equal. Lead-off batters are guaranteed to have one plate appearance per game that will not end up in a double play. Teams with high on base percentages as a whole, will have more opportunities because they have more players reaching first base. Players in the 2/3/4/5 spots in the lineup will have more opportunities because the hitters in front of them will reach base more often (assuming proper lineup construction).
To show this graphically, I decided to make a scatter plot for double plays and double play opportunities. It includes all players with at least 25 opportunities this season.
*Data grabbed from the indispensable Baseball-Reference
The red line shows the league average double play rate, which is around 11% of opportunities. Basically, the farther away from the line to the top left, the better the player has been at avoiding double plays. Conversely, the farther from the line to the bottom right, the worse they are. I added labels for the biggest outliers and most notable offensive players.
Some things the players on the top left have in common:
– Left-handed. Left-handed batters are a few feet closer to first base, so their time to first is, on average, shorter.
– Speed. This is simple. Faster players will beat out more throws to first than slower players.
– Flyball hitters. Fewer ground balls, fewer double plays.
– High strikeouts: You can’t ground into a double play if you don’t put the ball in play.
A couple of notes:
– Lonnie Chisenhall has had 70 opportunities and has yet to ground into a double play.
– The Cubs Rizzo and Bryant have combined for 284 opportunities and have grounded into 15 double palys (8 and 7 respectively). Compare that to Yasmany Tomas who has grounded into 15 double plays in just 72 opportunities.
– It’s no coincidence that the games best hitters (Trout, Harper, Donaldson, Goldschmdit, Votto, etc are all at league average or better.