Felix Pie has put up great numbers at a young age, in the Minor Leagues. Thing is, he's pretty hideous in the bigs. His lack of zone judgment is very clear just watching him hit, and the PITCHf/x data has supported that. He's looking even worse now.
Broken down by location nine ways (8 out of zone, 1 in the zone), we don't have enough data to make sense of 2008. So I'm crudely cutting it into out of zone and in strike zone (OOZ and ISZ) in order to quickly compare the two years (324 pitches for 2007 and 75 for this year).
| OOZ | 2007 | 2008 | ISZ | 2007 | 2008 | |
| All | 166 | 41 | All | 158 | 34 | |
| B | 103 | 19 | B | 16 | 1 | |
| CS | 12 | 3 | CS | 46 | 8 | |
| SS | 18 | 8 | SS | 10 | 3 | |
| F | 17 | 4 | F | 48 | 13 | |
| X | 16 | 6 | X | 38 | 9 | |
| HR | 0 | 0 | HR | 0 | 0 | |
| Sw | 51 | 18 | Sw | 96 | 25 | |
| OOZ | 2007 | 2008 | ISZ | 2007 | 2008 | |
| B | 62.0% | 46.3% | B | 10.1% | 2.9% | |
| CS | 7.2% | 7.3% | CS | 29.1% | 23.5% | |
| SS | 10.8% | 19.5% | SS | 6.3% | 8.8% | |
| F | 10.2% | 9.8% | F | 30.4% | 38.2% | |
| X | 9.6% | 14.6% | X | 24.1% | 26.5% | |
| HR | 0.0% | 0.0% | HR | 0.0% | 0.0% | |
| Swrt | 30.7% | 43.9% | Swrt | 60.8% | 73.5% | |
| Whiff | 35.3% | 44.4% | Whiff | 10.4% | 12.0% | |
| B:CS | 8.6 | 6.3 | B:CS | 0.3 | 0.1 |
He's swinging more, in and out of the zone. He's also whiffing more often. As a result of all those swings, he is putting the ball in play more often.
As far as his hitting stats, well, again, terribly small sample to deal with, but he is doing very poorly. Last year, he had a B:K rate of 14:43, this year 0:5 (thru seven games). His OPS+ has dropped from 53 to 16, which is just absurd and, effectively, meaningless at this stage of the season. But, it is quite obvious, Felix Pie is not getting any better. Should that sentence end with a "yet" ?
2 comments:
23 PAs is well below the point of meaningfulness as far as sample size goes; Pizza Cutter has a great primer on how many PAs you need to draw conclusions about a player.
Swing percentage seems to need only about 50 PAs to stabilize, which is a pretty small sample where baseball stats are concerned, but we're not even halfway there yet. I think it's a little early to be writing off Felix Pie.
CW - I think the post is pretty honest about the sample size and the lede is "he's not getting better" and that's about it, so I think you're comment is a strawman argument. I certainly don't think I'm writing him off, rather, pointing out that we haven't seen any progress to date. Taken as a whole, his 2007 and 2008 numbers do comprise a reasonable sample, and paint an ugly picture. This post should be considered a baseline for further analysis.
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