One can chalk up the Pirates’ 2-0 loss to the Brewers Sunday for not taking advantage of opportunities or being efficient at the plate when there were runners in scoring position.
Daniel Vogelbach, on the other hand, was about as efficient as a hitter could be. In four trips to the plate, he swung the bat just three times. He had three hits:
Keep in mind, he did one day after pulling this in his first two trips to the plate against the Brewers:
The long con pic.twitter.com/U8lZSHwxYR
— Alex Stumpf (@AlexJStumpf) July 2, 2022
“Sometimes when you’ve got really good arms on the mound, you don’t get much to hit,” Vogelbach told me after the game. “You only get a certain amount of pitches to hit, and when you get them, you’ve got to put a good swing on them.”
Vogelbach has done a good job of doing that this season. According to Baseball Savant, he’s in the 94th percentile in chase percentage, so he rarely swings at junk. His 13.4% walk rate puts him in the 96th percentile. And, of course, he hits the ball hard, averaging a 90.7 mph exit velocity.
Put that all together, and his .235/.336/.435 slash line makes sense, a solid showing for a guy who is on a bounceback campaign.
The one holdback from his offensive game – well, besides sprint speed – is the strikeouts, though. He’s struck out in 24.1% of his plate appearances this year, but unlike a lot of hitters with high strikeout rates, it’s not because he whiffs. In fact, his 21.3% whiff rate is well below the league average.
His strikeouts come from him looking at strikes. Look at that chart from Sunday again. He took six called strikes, which is why he also struck out in his three-hit game.
That’s the curious thing about Vogelbach the hitter. He does better when he swings less. Check out this rolling chart comparing his OPS over 15 game stretches to how often he swings:
It’s right on the nose. A couple weeks ago, Vogelbach was in his worst slump of the season. He was swinging at a lot more pitches then. Now he’s on his best hot stretch. He’s barely swinging during it.
At the time of publication, Vogelbach has 232 plate appearances, meaning he is 13 short of qualifying for the batting title (3.1 PA per team game played). He’s only qualified once, back when he took 558 trips to the plate in 2019, but he’s got a good shot of doing it again this year.
For now, though, let’s look at through the lens of hitters with at least 200 plate appearances this year. Vogelbach swings the least out of all of them, by a fairly decent margin. Vogelbach has swung at just 32.6% of his pitches seen. His next closest contemporary is Max Muncy at 35.4%.
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There’s as big a gap between Vogelbach and second place as there is between second and eighth.
If Vogelbach does finish the year qualified for the batting title, he is on pace for the third-lowest swing rate of any hitter since it started being tracked in 2002, and the lowest since 2010.
2010 Brett Gardner, 30.6%
2009 Luis Castillo, 31%
2010 Bobby Abreu, 32.6%
Is it the right decision to be so patient? Obviously Vogelbach is putting up good numbers, and part of the reason why the Pirates picked him up originally and why Derek Shelton batted him leadoff at the start of the year is because he sees more pitches than just about anyone. But a called strike over the heart of the plate is a missed opportunity.
I asked Michael Chavis, owner of the fifth-highest swing rate among those hitters with 200 PAs (58.6%), if he ever talks to Vogelbach about swinging more.
“If anything, I’m trying to be more like him,” he answered.
It’s a fair response, and again, Vogelbach is having a solid year in the heart of the Pirates’ lineup. He has a plan when he goes to the plate, and if he doesn’t have to swing at something he doesn’t like, he won’t.
“When you have an approach, you stick with an approach,” Vogelbach said before cracking a smirk. “Sometimes it backfires and you guys get to write about how I took a pitch that I should’ve hit.
“These guys are really good in this league. If you try to cover the whole plate, hit everything and hit all their stuff, you get caught in between, and it’s really tough hitting like that.”
