Joey Votto is Apparently Ruining Baseball

Or so Tom Verducci would like you to think.

Verducci is a fairly visible and well-known writer for Sports Illustrated who recently penned an article (which can be read in its entirety by clicking here) entitled "Virtue, and victory, no longer synonymous with patience at the plate." Alliteration aside, this title is clearly making no effort to disguise its own absurdity.

Verducci basically spends 1,400 words complaining about how extremely-patient hitters like Joey Votto are hurting baseball because their at-bats are too long, they strike out too much, and they're causing the recent decline in offense across the majors. Without copying-and-pasting the entire diatribe, there are a few notable or entertaining gems in the piece worth commenting on. Like this, for instance:

Welcome to the state of the art in hitting these days, where aggressiveness is disdained and passivity is exalted. The modern hitter is guided by the accepted wisdom in catchphrases such as "driving up pitch counts," "taking pitches" and "quality at-bats."

Particularly enjoyable in this paragraph is the way Verducci puts sarcastic quotes around legitimate baseball strategies, as if "quality at-bats" don't lead to "walks" and "hits" and "runs."

Verducci:

There is one serious flaw in this groupthink strategy. It isn't working. Hitters are striking out more than ever before in baseball history while runs, walks, hits and home runs have been on the decline for years.

It is now Verducci's job to convince the reader that this decline in offense has been caused by the baseball cancers known as "quality at-bats" and "driving up pitch counts." Spoiler alert: he fails to do this.

And while teams still preach the religion of driving up pitch counts to "get into the bullpen" of the other team, they may be pushing an outdated agenda. So fortified are major league bullpens these days, especially with hard throwers, that last year relievers posted an ERA more than half a run lower than starters and averaged almost one strikeout for every inning."

That last sentence there is worth a jaw-dropping double-take. "... last year relievers posted an ERA more than half a run lower than starters." I mean ... no kidding, man. It's almost like relievers ALWAYS have lower ERAs than starters because of the inherent nature of their job. It's almost like relievers are asked to get only two or three outs at a time while starting pitchers are expected to pitch six or seven innings. It's almost like many relievers are specialized to only face same-sided hitters -- lefties on lefties and vice versa. Saying that relievers posted a better ERA than starters last year is like saying, "hitters who bat leadoff have higher batting averages than hitters who bat ninth." That's some super sleuthing, Sherlock.

Verducci is right when he says that many bullpens are now fortified with hard throwers and elite strikeout relievers. But most teams only have one or two of those shutdown pitchers. Chances are that the reliever a team will likely face in the sixth or seventh inning is going to be a lot weaker than that day's starting pitcher. Driving up a starter's pitch count, tiring him, and knocking him out of the game as early as possible is just a good baseball strategy. The only exception is when a truly miserable starter is on the mound and you're better off just pulverizing him (a.k.a., whenever you're playing the Twins).

The proliferation of measurables in baseball is helping a generation of hitters turn offense into a passive aggressive pursuit. While batting average rightly has lost much of its inflated value, the flip side is that ubiquitous pitch counts, pitches per plate appearance, walks and on-base percentage are influencing how hitters go about their jobs.

The horror!

What we are left with is a sport in which games keep getting longer but with less and less action. The ball is not put in play on 81 percent of the pitches, an all-time record of inactivity. The knottiest issue for baseball is not the stadium issues of Oakland and Tampa Bay or the Biogenesis scandal; it's the increased lack of action in your average baseball game.

So we've arrived at the crux of the problem: Tom Verducci is bored watching baseball. Look, buddy, I don't know what to tell you. Presumably you knew what you were getting into with this sport. Baseball is slow. It always has been. Hitters taking more or less pitchers can't really change the sport's inherent nature. If your attention span is lacking, the NBA Playoffs will be on TV for the next, like, six months. That Pacers-Hawks series looks particularly riveting (hahaha nope).

Nobody swings 3-and-0 any more. You're supposed to take the pitch to drive up the pitch count and lengthen your at-bat, nevermind that it might be the best pitch the hitter sees. Last year major league hitters managed only 94 hits on 3-and-0 counts, or about one hit on a 3-0 pitch every 26 games. (They hit .348 when they did put 3-0 pitches into play). The 94 hits on 3-0 were down 24 percent in just a decade, down from 123 hits in 2002. So because hitters swing less often on 3-and-0, Werth gets criticized for doing something "wrong," even though the average big leaguer slugs .767 when he does put such pitches into play.

This article is like a scavenger hunt for all the different types of logical fallacies. The problem with Verducci's point here is selection bias. He wants hitters to swing at 3-and-0 pitches more often because those who do are hitting .348 and slugging .767. The assumption is that if more hitters swing 3-and-0, they too will hit .348 and slug .767. But obviously that's not the case. Presumably, hitters are already swinging at the most desirable 3-and-0 pitches, which is why that average and slugging percentage are so high. Logically, if they began swinging at more 3-and-0 pitches, they would be less successful and those impressive rates would drop.

Verducci then provides the centerpiece of his argument: a graph that shows how players are swinging at the first pitch just 26% of the time in 2013, down from 33% in 1988. It also depicts the rise in overall strikeout rates, from 14.7% to 20.2%, across the same time period. His reaction to this data:

Do the math: hitters are swinging at the first pitch less and less and striking out more and more.

No, there is no math. The logical error here? Verducci hasn't proven in any way that there's a correlation between "swinging at the first pitch" and "increased strikeout rate." Anyone can make a graph with two trends side-by-side and claim a correlation. With that method, I could claim that an increase in hot dog consumption at ballparks since 1983 is the reason behind the increased strikeout rate. Do the math!

You hear so much talk about "grinding out at-bats" and "making the pitcher throw more pitches" that you would think seeing a lot of pitches is a denominator to success. You would be wrong. There is no correlation between seeing more pitches and winning more games. Entering this week, only one of the six first-place teams ranked among the top 11 teams in pitches per plate appearance. Five of those 11 teams that saw the most pitches had losing records.

There might be no worse crime in sports analysis than using three weeks of baseball games to make broad, sweeping conclusions. The month of April would also have us believe that Buster Posey and Giancarlo Stanton are bad at baseball, but Coco Crisp is an MVP candidate and the Colorado Rockies are World Series favorites. It's three weeks! And you're citing first-place teams! Good lord.

Last year there were 13 teams that ranked above average in most pitches per plate appearance. Nine of those 13 teams did not make the postseason.

Come on, man. This is ridiculous. There is no ONE SACRED STATISTIC that correlates to baseball success. If there was -- I'm pretty sure we would know about it. Using this argument to discredit an entire school of thought about plate discipline is really weak. Of course seeing a lot of pitches doesn't guarantee a winning season by itself. The Red Sox and Twins both ranked within the top five in pitches-per-plate-appearance last year, but both were awful and missed the playoffs by a wide margin. Why? Because their patient approach at the plate failed miserably? No. Because they had the third- and fourth-worst pitching staffs in baseball.

The two pennant winners, San Francisco and Detroit, ranked 25th and 27th in pitches per plate appearance.

Again -- trying to prove a point using the eensy-weensy sample size of a singe postseason is cruelly misleading. The Detroit Tigers were pushed all the way to Game 5 in the first round by the Oakland Athletics, the team that happened to see the MOST pitches-per-plate-appearance in the majors. What if the A's had won that game? Would that lone result have ruined Verducci's entire narrative? Basically, if the point you're trying to make hinged on the result of a single baseball game, it's probably not a point worth pushing.

Oh, and the Tigers had Justin Verlander. The Giants had Matt Cain. What are we even doing here.

If there is one hitter who best personifies the modern passive aggressive approach it is [Joey] Votto. He has phenomenal patience, balance and hand-eye coordination. Last year he came to the plate 475 times and suffered the embarrassment of the one-pitch out only 19 times. This year Votto is off to a wildly efficient start. In 20 games he has reached base 49 times, including 25 times by way of a walk. His on-base percentage is a robust .500. According to the favored modern measurables, he is an offensive dynamo of historic proportions.

Joey Votto is getting on base a lot. His team, the Cincinnati Reds, ranks third in the majors in runs scored. Now there's a correlation you can believe in.

But that's not the whole story. Votto, who won the 2010 NL MVP Award when he hit 37 home runs, has become an extreme version of himself. He is swinging the bat less often with each passing year. No one should advocate Votto start chasing more pitches out of the strike zone, but it's interesting to see how Votto is letting more and more good pitches go by without attempting to swing. His percentage of swings at strikes has gone down four straight years: 74, 73, 69, 62, 60. Votto has told me the more pitches he sees, the more he believes the at-bat swings in his favor.

If Joey Votto says that seeing more pitches is a good thing, I'm inclined to believe that seeing more pitches is a good thing.

Now consider what Votto has done this year with runners on base. The Reds' number three hitter has come to the plate 51 times with runners on and produced zero extra-base hits. His slugging percentage with runners on is .188. Only twice this year has he driven in a teammate with a hit. But he has an awesome on-base percentage.

This obsession with tiny sample sizes is infuriating. Verducci is judging Votto on 51 plate appearances. Fifty-one. That's nothing. Any baseball player can look like Ted Williams or like a Double-A scrub in 51 plate appearances. Vernon Wells, whose OPS was .682 last year, and .660 the year before, is at .930 through 79 plate appearances this April. Mike Trout hit .220 in his first 135 plate appearances of his career. Meaningless.

What makes Verducci's point here even more hilarious is this: in 1,425 career plate appearances with runners on base, Joey Votto has hit like a god: .336/.455/.578. Last year, with runners on base, he was even better: .353/.510/.673 in 210 plate appearances. Joey Votto is awesome with runners on base. He's awesome with no one on base. He's awesome whenever he's wearing a baseball uniform (and maybe even when he isn't, though I don't have that kind of access). It took me like, five seconds to look up these numbers. Verducci apparently couldn't be bothered.

The problem is the state of the art isn't working. Few hitters are as good as Votto. More teams than ever deploy two batting coaches, not one. More ballparks have constructed multiple batting tunnels that almost never go empty from four hours prior to the game to the last out. Video is more abundant and portable than ever. More data is available. And yet the modern approach to hitting is failing. Pitchers are four years into a run of dominance and there are no signs that their run is abating, especially when the modern passive aggressive approach to hitting has become so ingrained.

Having read the entire article, at no point did Verducci convince me that the recent decline in offense can be explained by a new "passive-aggressive" ideology on plate discipline. In fact, Verducci is probably overstating the trends he's slamming. In 2002 (the year before "Moneyball" was published), hitters swung the bat, on average, 46.5% percent of the time. That percentage has dropped, like Verducci claims, but only down to 46.0% last year -- a decline by half of one percentage point. Similarly, hitters saw an average of 3.74 pitches-per-plate-appearance in 2002, and 3.83 last year. An increase, but again a slight one, by just a tenth of a point. So it's hard to see how this "passive-aggressive" ideology has taken over the game like Verducci seems to be claiming.

Yes, a slightly more patient approach at the plate across the sport is probably one of the factors behind the current low-run-scoring environment in baseball. But by no means is it a major one, or even the only one. Offense is down because drug testing ended the steroid era, and because pitchers are throwing harder than ever before, and because teams are putting a new premium on defensive value often at the expense of offense, and because bullpens are becoming more and more specialized, and because Yu Darvish and Stephen Strasburg and Craig Kimbrel exist. Joey Votto is certainly not one of the reasons why baseball is scoring fewer runs. On the contrary, Joey Votto is doing literally everything he can to generate more runs, and people who are actually paying attention know that he's gotten quite good at it, too.