Our pal Wishhiker noticed that no less than 42% of Dustin Ackley's strikeouts were "looking" at called strike three. He wondered how that stacked up to other hitters in the majors.
Not surprisingly, he had a hard time finding those kind of stats, because, for some reason, baseball-reference.com makes them rather hard to find.
But here's how.
A the top of this post you see a screenshot from the b-ref homepage. In the grey bar, you'll see the sixth tab over is called "leaders." If you hover over that, you'll get a drop-down box that looks like this:
Since we're looking for a hitting stat, we'll click on "MLB Batting Leaders: 2013" which will take us to a very misleading screen like this:
s" box, that's it's usually easier to use "control-F" (the "Find" function) and type in the name of the player you're looking for rather than trying to scroll up and down to find him.
Hope that helps.
Hey Spec,
Major THANK YOU for this post...had no idea there was more to the leaders pages than met the eye...LOL
And...this little experiment would seem to confirm that Ackley is way...way too patient and needs to quit being stubborn and start fouling off 2-strike pitches.
Any chance we can get this article anchored on the sidebar? Would love to be able to come back to this as a reference.
It's always a bit difficult on my phone but that's where I do everything most of the time. I figured Ackley's 671 PA last year made it a good year to just look at the total looking strikeouts. His % was only* 31% last year but he was 15th in looking strikeouts behind Stubbs, Dunn, Pedro Alvarez, Dan Uggla, Both Uptons, R. Weeks, H Ramirez, David Wright, Choo, Chris Davis, Danny Espinosa, Corey Hart and Josh Willingham. Hmm. That's not bad company. Logically if they weren't doing well enough they wouldn't have gotten enough PA to rack up the total (unless a Def specialist) so that doesn't show as much as I hoped.
Turning off qualifiers for L/so% adds in a bunch of pitchers and 100% guys with few PA so I turned it back on and he was 25th. Most of those same names plus other all Stars and defensive specialists ahead of him so that stat alone is possible to do well despite it being high. 40% or higher from 2012 (qualifiers, I know omissions. Looking for inclusions though); Span, Callaspo, Altuve, Scutaro, Jon Jay, Michael Brantley, Ben Revere, Justin Upton, David Wright and Teixeira. This year Tulowiski, Trout and Coco Crisp are at 38%. None of them raised it 11% over last year though.
Thanky kindly Spec. Your ability to serve never ceases to boggle the mind. :- )