Cubs vs. Jays - Zone Judgment

Always looking for a quick and easy way to rate players, I've revisited the notion of zone judgment for the upcoming series in Toronto. I've decided to use a very simple measure, which I'll call swing selection (swsel). Very simple. Swings at pitches in the zone, divided by swings out of the zone, and, to make it look like a normal baseball rate statistic, divide by ten. Higher is better.

name	team	#	swsel
Kosuke Fukudome	chn	1,131	0.351
Mark DeRosa	chn	2,068	0.322
Geovany Soto	chn	1,175	0.304
Jim Edmonds	chn	1,307	0.294
Derrek Lee	chn	2,478	0.278
Ryan Theriot	chn	2,066	0.249
Aramis Ramirez	chn	2,024	0.244
Mike Fontenot	chn	1,120	0.238
Henry Blanco	chn	229	0.197
Micah Hoffpauir	chn	57	0.185
Eric Patterson	chn	59	0.176
Reed Johnson	chn	1,441	0.172
Ronny Cedeno	chn	553	0.168
Marco Scutaro	tor	1,784	0.379
Joe Inglett	tor	255	0.304
Lyle Overbay	tor	2,034	0.296
Brad Wilkerson	tor	1,869	0.285
Matt Stairs	tor	1,642	0.263
Scott Rolen	tor	1,114	0.245
Curtis Thigpen	tor	290	0.243
Kevin Mench	tor	537	0.200
Alex Rios	tor	2,711	0.199
Vernon Wells	tor	1,988	0.190
John McDonald	tor	957	0.187
Rod Barajas	tor	531	0.186
David Eckstein	tor	1,435	0.181

Here's a chart of the active hitters (all shown above) for the Cubs and Jays, best to worst. You can see they're virtually identical.



These numbers include all of the data available from 2007 and 2008. The zone is standardized, which will bias the data against shorter hitters. It is 1.5 ft to 3.5 ft above field level, and the plate is wide, 2 ft. instead of 17 inches. This reflects the zone hitters actually swing and take around.

Our scrappy shortstop is better than their scrappy shortstop

Theriot  .249
Eckstein .181

This just has to be a major component of scrappiness. These guys take good at bats and work the count. Or, one of them does.