Here’s one of those theses that’s been said a million times before, but still not enough because too few people have caught on. Patience is good because walks are good. Walks are underrated. But the biggest benefit of patience is an increase in power.
There’s only one Vladimir Guerrero. Everyone else is a much better hitter when they swing at pitches in their wheelhouse. When you chase pitches, you’re compromising. And by “chase pitches”, I don’t just mean “chase balls”. Sure, letting non-strikes go by is good, but so is letting well-thrown strikes go by (unless you’ve got two strikes, naturally). If you’re a low-ball hitter, do everything you can to hit more low pitches — that means laying off higher pitches, whether they’re strikes or balls. I’m always reminded of the Ted Williams exhibit at the Hall of Fame. Williams’ strike zone is filled with color-coded baseballs, signifying his expected batting average if he had to hit pitches thrown to that spot. Teddy knew where he was dangerous and let the rest go.
If you look at the 2005 walks leaders, it’s filled with sluggers.
giles,brian
abreu,bobby
dunn,adam
giambi,jason
helton,todd
ortiz,david
burrell,pat
pujols,albert
bay,jason
rodriguez,alex
edmonds,jim
berkman,lance
sexson,richie
lee,derrek
ensberg,morgan
wilkerson,brad
glaus,troy
konerko,paul
ramirez,manny
johnson,nick
Sure, guys with power are often given fewer strikes to hit and thus walk more often, but it works the other way around, too. Players who wait for their pitch end up swinging at more meatballs and fewer waste-pitches. Little League coaches know what they’re talking about when they preach “wait for your pitch”.
Let’s try some numbers, courtesy of 2005. Here’s the correlation between walk-rate and other common measures of skill using batters with at least 75 plate appearances in order to avoid the really weird performances. These correlations won’t prove anything, but it’s an interesting excercise.
AVG .033 — It looks as though getting hits doesn’t depend much on working the count for your pitch.
BABIP .104 — When batters put the ball in play, however, they get hits slightly more often when they also show good patience.
OBP .692 — Here’s a no-brainer. It’s interesting to note that batting average doesn’t correlate much better with OBP (.720).
ISO .361 — Walking is associated with power. Granted it’s not causation, but this is nice to see.
HR/AB .380 — Walking is associated slightly stronger with homerun power than power in general.
XR/PA .538 — As we know, taking walks is good. Add in the fact that players who walk a lot tend to hit for more power, and walks are a pretty good measure of overall value. (ISO correlates with XR/PA at a .823 clip.)
SO/AB .314 — Working the count also results in more two-strike counts and therefore more strikeouts.
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Sky is a baseball fan and racket sport afficianado living in upstate NY. His favorite color is orange and is just about ready to give up on his life-long dream to become the next Magnus ver Magnuson (World's Strongest Man). His favorite baseball teams are the Yankees and Red Sox, proving that there's hope in the Middle East. 
May 11th, 2006 at 4:05 pm
Sky, did you see Nate Silver’s analysis of this issue? My interpretation of his article is that the impact of a pitcher pitching around a slugger is much higher than you imply. He looked at pitch-specific data for Juan Pierre and Manny Ramirez (I think) and concluded that Pierre has just as good an eye as Manny, but pitchers give Pierre better pitchers to hit.
On the other hand, there was also a recent New York Times article about Jason Giambi’s approach to the plate that is right in line with your reasoning.
Might be a good subject for fangraphs…