Great Hitters Should Be Greedy
Some players' at-bats are just more valuable than others'.
On Opening Day, in the second inning, with the bases loaded, and a 2-0 count, Brice Turang took a pitch that was just off the inside corner. The umpire called it a strike. Turang had a chance to make trivia, to be the first player in Milwaukee Brewers history to challenge a pitch.
Given the situation—many baserunners, advanced count—he only needed to be 30 percent confident in a challenge to justify it, according to Oyster Analytics’ challenge-math tool. But Turang passed up the chance. Two pitches later he struck out.
Now two months later, Turang still hasn’t challenged a pitch. Joe Sheehan used to write a fun annual column at Baseball Prospectus called The DiSars, which commemorated the batter who went the deepest into each season without drawing a walk. Turang is the clear frontrunner to be the player who goes the deepest into this season (by pitches seen) without issuing an ABS challenge.
Of the 250 players who’ve seen the most pitches this year, all but nine have filed at least one challenge (and some have filed as many as 19). These are the nine non-challengers, along with how many called strikes they’ve accepted:
Francisco Lindor: 65
José Tena: 66
Josh Lowe: 75
Carlos Narváez: 78
Shea Langeliers: 99
Brandon Marsh: 105
TJ Friedl: 117
Yandy Díaz: 136
Brice Turang: 177
Turang is a bit of an unexpected champion here. He is a hitter who treats the strike zone with extreme consideration. He’s got the sixth highest walk rate in the majors. He’s an MVP candidate right now, in part because he has doubled his walk rate, in large part because he has cut his chase rate from just league average to one of the league’s best. He both knows the strike zone and he cares deeply about it, and yet when it comes to free balls he’s on track to be the league’s most reluctant claimant.
Turang has so far taken eight pitches that he could have challenged1 successfully.
He wasn’t fooled by those eight pitches. After one strike call he shook his head in disagreement,
at another he snapped his head back toward the umpire,
he exhaled a disapproving “oooh” at another one,
and gave a smirky grimace at another.
So that’s at least half of his wrongly called strikes where he demonstratively understood he’d been wronged, but was unwilling to risk a challenge.
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One variable that helps explain this is Turang’s team. Brewers hitters just don’t challenge much. They have the lowest challenge rate (on offense) in baseball. On defense, meanwhile, they have the second-highest challenge rate. This has all the appearances of a teamwide philosophy based on some easy-to-grasp math: Their hitters’ challenges have been successful only 32 percent of the time, while their catchers’ challenges have been successful 57 percent of the time, so giving the defense a near-monopoly on challenges is a much more efficient use of an expendable resource. (The Marlins have similar tendencies.)
But if the Brewers have suggested this logic to their hitters, they clearly haven’t mandated it. We know this because their DH Gary Sánchez has challenged 16 times. He has nearly half the team’s challenges! Gary Sánchez, batting on a team that clearly seems not to believe in batters challenging, has a challenge rate 500 percent higher than the league average. He’s the second-most challenging hitter in baseball.
More hitters need to challenge like Gary Sánchez. More hitters need to challenge like Brice Turang. But it’s the hitters like Turang who should challenge like Sánchez, and it’s the hitters like Sánchez who should challenge like Turang. Broadening out, the league as a whole doesn’t seem to have gotten this.
