Just playing around with Excel this morning. Here’s a plot of the O-Swing% — the percentage of swings a batter takes on pitches outside of the strike zone — for all hitters in the MLB last season with at least 100 PA’s. The red line is league average for O-Swing% for the 2008 season. I’ll let you guess who’s sitting all alone up at the top-left.
To give you a reference point: Barry Bonds had an O-Swing% of 13% from 2005-2007 when FanGraphs started tracking this information. Can we bring him back as a hitting coach? I’m not necessarliy saying that our Mystery Hacker is a bad hitter, because we’re just talking about swings outside of the zone and not the ability to make contact out of the zone, but it’s still pretty incredible to see a hitter that far away from everyone else.
