MVN: Most Valuable Network

Last night, despite Ortiz's 2-4 night, I was frustrated at the way he handled the at-bat against Rafael Betancourt, especially the second pitch. Take a look:

Today I read an article by Pizza Cutter about if foul balls can tell us anything about a hitter. Essentially, he found:

Foul balls early in the count speak of a player who doesn’t make a lot contact, when he does make contact he’s not likely to hit it fair, who strikes out a lot, but when he hits the ball, it’s more likely to go out of the ballpark. Two strike foul balls speak of a hitter who makes good contact, keeps at bats alive, but is generally just a singles hitter. Low risk, low reward.

I e-mailed Pizza Cutter and inquired as to Ortiz's history with foul balls and his 2008 stats. Unfortunately, 2008 statistics are unavailable, but he still provided an eye into Big Papi:

David Ortiz, 2003-2007

Contact rates, 79%, 79%, 79%, 78%, 80% (in 2007, 194th out of 306 qualified)

Foul contact, 50% 52%, 49%, 50%, 51% (38th)

2-strike foul balls per 2 strike PA: 1.02, 1.07, .91, .90, 1.07 (69th)

Zero and one strike foul balls per PA: .21, .23, .23, .23, .21 (108th)

In general, Ortiz hits a lot of foul balls (including two strike fouls!) although he's a power hitter and power hitters are generally high risk/high reward swingers, hence a lot of K's and a lot of HR's. Part of the reason that he's so good is that his swing allows him to recover from a big swing midway and at least poke a ball foul to stay alive.

David Ortiz's "slump" is nothing more than a run of bad luck. BABIP is generally within control of the hitter and Ortiz, a lifetime .310 BABIP hitter is hitting .114 this year. His line drives are down and he's beating the ball into the ground and generally at infielders (not a good idea for a guy who's that slow), although he hasn't really amassed a big enough sample of PA to really know for sure whether this is just random noise or not. His HR/FB is also down (he's only got the one HR so far...) but again, we're still in the small sample size part of the season. As much as I'd love it if he would politely hit like this for the next few months (or at least until the Red Sox get out of Cleveland tonight), I wouldn't bet on that happening unless there's some sort of (major) injury that we don't know about. Patience is a virtue. Y'all waited 86 years. Ortiz will be fine.

Thanks to Pizza Cutter for his great find. Visit his blog on sabermetrics.