World Series rings says nothing of the individual performance. Unless you want to tell me Ted Willaims wasn’t that good.

Or, we can go back and look at past World Series winners and see how many of them were anchored by their own highly rated farm hands.

Probably somewhere in the tens of thousands!

No I think your giving the Batter too much credit.
Can he force the pitcher to throw a ball?

NO!

So how does a batter go about walking more if the pitcher never throws him a ball?

Scare may not work for Castillo but it does work for guys like Jeter and A-Rod and Pujols

They won’t throw fat pitches to those guys!

Why?

Because they are more worried about them hitting it than they are walking him. A Walk is better in the eyes of a pitcher than a double or HR. Even better than a single in many cases! Because a single can advance any runners that happen to be on at the time.

So if you get a batter who hits he will generate those balls the pitcher throws and draw more walks.

I know you think if you walk your going to get better pitches to hit next at bat but that isn’t the case.
That only works if the guy actually CAN hit and OBP doesn’t address that little skill set!

And what will happen instead is the PASSIVE act of trying to draw a walk will cause the guy to get punched out looking at a called strike unless he protects the plate on those borderline pitches and gets a pitch that even a weak BA guy can hit!

Putting Castillo on in front of Wright, Beltran, Davis and Bay? Please.

Pitching around Tejada and Thole to “get to the pitcher?” yeah maybe 3 times a year. Other than that they want to record outs from them all.

Castillo, Tejada and Thole don’t scare anyone with their bats and yet combined to walk 10% of the time.

Your giving pitchers waaaaayyyy too much credit. Very few can paint it like Lee.

The whole idea is not to let the hitter get the best part of the bat on the ball. Throw strikes but on the edges, change speed, vary your pitches, move it up, down, in and out. Throw strikes but don’t get hurt. Swim without getting wet. It’s a lot harder than your making it out to be.

Before each game everyone knows who can keep you off balance while throwing strikes, but even those guys have off innings, don’t get a call, even off games and there aren’t too many of them to begin with.

If you swing at what the pitcher wants you to swing at all the time your never going to get to swing at what you want to.

I think you have it backwards. Good hitters get themselves into good counts, see good pitches and hit good pitches

The pitcher will throw you strikes mostly because thats his job. Walking will not make him throw you more strikes but HITTING might make him throw fewer!

You can’t assume the reason the guy walked was because they guy was trying to throw a ball. It could just as easily be because he missed!

As far as the counts are concerned where you are in the count doesn’t matter. the only thing that changes is the margin for error!

With two strikes on you (and that includes 3-2) your margin of error as a batter is slimmer! You can’t AFFORD to take a borderline pitch there! You either have to be able to hit the snot out of it or foul it off on a borderline pitch. If you don’t then you know who decides? The Umpire and he doesn’t really care what your OBP is or what you did in the last at bat!

You can NOT let ANYONE the pitcher or the umpire take the bat OUT of your hands!

By supporting OBP and saying you need to take more walks you are encouraging or selecting guys who are PASSIVE and let someone else decide what happens!

But if you foul it off YOU control the at bat. Not the Pitcher, not the Umpire but YOU!

Thats the key to being a good hitter. Not letting the Pitcher or the Umpire determine what happens. Decide those things and control them by yourself!

OBP rewards the passive behavior.
Look at how many called third strikes Ike took last year looking at the ump!

HE was going for OBP!
And he failed by doing that!

He should have fouled off those pitches and not given the Ump the opportunity to end the at bat on a borderline call!

If he had he might not have had that long slump where he was caught looking 3 at bats per game!

Thios is why I hate it when people think the OBP is important because all they REALLY mean is more walks when Hits are a much better result.

They should be focused only smacking the hell out of the baseball and if the pitch isn’t fat but close enough to call then foul it off until you can!

When an OBVIOUS ball comes along ok take the walk.
But thats only possible if the pitcher fails it has nothing to do with the EYE of the batter!

When you show the pitcher that he has to throw you strikes he will. The more strikes you get, the better all your numbers will be. BA, OB SLG.

The more often your in a good hitters count, the less often your behind in the count. That does make a huge difference even if you don’t realize it.

I can tell that your not of the belief that walks have any merit either on their own or because taking them helps you later. I’m cool with that.

Pay attention some day on a 1-1 count and see the AB shift toward whoever gets the next pitch their way. 1-2 is hard to recover from. 2-1 puts you in the drivers seat.

Swing away Metsie.

If the shoe REALLY doesn’t fit…DON’T WEAR IT! LOL

Ok?

now onto what you DID say…
“A good hitter has an OB% .75 points above their BA. If they don’t it’s because their not being selective enough.”

Does it really mean that? Couldn’t he just get REAL hits instead?

You see this is one of the problem with OBP in general. It supposes that the OBP is only a property of the batter but it is not! Not when it included HBP, and K’s to the backstop. Those are not something that the BATTER causes directly, maybe indirectly but he can’t force a pitcher to do those things.

What you saying in essence is he didn’t walk or get hit by a pitch enough but that doesn’t mean he made an out!
You presume that a pitcher will ALWAYS present the WALK as an option to a batter. And your assuming that because his OBP isn’t higher than his BA that he is not mtaking those opportunities. But that is a very WRONG assumption. A GUESS at best!

What if the pitcher never threw those 4 balls and the guy hit it instead. There would be no EXTRA OB and the batter would have showed just as much selectivie skill as a guy who walks more!

In essence by saying OBP is better than BA your saying walking is better than hitting! Do YOU believe that?

Again backwards thinking in my opinion!

Selectivity at the plate isn’t about taking balls it’s about NOT TAKING strikes!

It is that BA that encourages a Pitcher to throw all those balls that you are presuming appear in every at bat!

If a guy hits .300 and has an OBP of .300 does that mean he isn’t selective at the plate?
Or does it mean that the pitcher didn’t offer the walk and he had to hit the ball to get on base?

OBP is a bad evaluator because it attributes Pitching failure to the batter when the Batter had little to nothing to do with that other than what his normal BA and HITTING numbers might suggest to the pitcher regarding dangerous or not.

This is why the yankees lead the league in OBP not because they are all the most selective guys in the league and NEVER swing at a ball when presented.

They swing based on their ability to hit is hard, somewhere that can get them on base and as a result Pitchers tend to not give them those pitches as much and as a result they walk more often than most other mortal batters do.

Selectivity can not be judged by OBP since Selectivity at the plate is dependent on the Pitcher throwing balls not the batter having a good eye!

If no balls are thrown then all the selectivity in the universe will not allow a batter to be selective at the plate and take a ball that never arrives!

And if he tries what will happen instead is he will strike out trying to make a strike into a ball because his EYE tricked him!

This is why I say fighting with two strikes and the skill to foul off pitches that are close enough to be called a strike is more important than taking a pitch that MAY or MAY NOT be a ball in the eyes of the Umpire!

Becuase by fouling it off you force the pitcher to make more throws which increases the liklihood the pitcher WILL miss on the next pitch badly or give you a pitch you CAN drive for a hit!

It is all about your preference, Passive or Aggressive!

OBP centric is rewarding Passive batting approach.
Don’t try to hit try to walk.
Don’t protect the plate try and get 4 balls.

Where as you can do ALL of that in an aggressive approach by protecting the plate and trying to get a hit and if you can’t string the pitcher along until he does something stupid!

You can’t force that pitcher to walk you but with a good BA you can scare him into thinking about it.
QAnd by protecting the plate with 2 Strikes and fouling off pitches that are close enough to call a strike you not only tire out the pitcher so he is less effective, You also get the reputation with the Umpires that says this guy never takes balls close enough to hit so when you DO they usually give you the benefit of the doubt!

And while your doing that your still trying to get the HIT which is much better than the walk any day of the week and 10 times on Sunday!

A select few hitters in the history of the game might be able to get away with that but most of them cannot.

Hitters are not getting OB (by hit or walk) as much as they could if they were less gullible.

The difference in BA on a 2-1 count vs. a 1-2 count is enormous. All it takes is one “ball” swung at and fouled off or missed to shift the advantage away from yourself and in favor of the pitcher.

If instead of getting a 2-1 fastball over the plate you get a 1-2 curve in the dirt or a slider off the plate and miss it again who’s going to be driving you in? No one.

By taking the free pass, when offered, you are A) getting on which beats the alternative and B) going to see better pitches. Seeing better pitches will increase your BA, OB AND SLG. I don’t see how this is a revelation.

If you have a player like Jose who goes outside the zone as often as he does, he’s leaving hits on the table because he is not a great “bad ball hitter.”

Reyes could have 40 bunt hits, 100 singles, 30 doubles, 15, triples and 15 HR’s. That would give him a .300 BA and a .300 OB.

Forget OB if you will. If he added 100 walks to that his BA would go up to .350 and it would climb even higher because pitchers would no longer be able to get him out on all the stuff he’s reaching for.

He reaches and fouls off a lot of pitches, many times, after taking a fastball over the plate he then fouls a dribbler off the plate and finds himself 1-2. Many other times he pops up off his front foot the pitch he’s reaching for. If he would just let the pitch come to him he’d be swinging at better pitches and he’d be getting more of them.

If he were also to get on for free quite a bit more what’s wrong with that?

If his OB was .400 instead of .320 that’s an extra 50 runs he could score. That’s an extra 50 times he opens holes in the infield for the next hitter. That’s an extra 50 times the next guy is more likely to get a FB to hit. That’s an extra 50 times the MI has to keep an eye on him. Being that both his BA and OB are being dragged down by his going outside the strike zone so much I just don’t see why anyone wouldn’t want him to be more selective.

I know this all started because of a BIAS in thinking that says a leadoff guy should get on base more. And it’s a fine premise if you are SETTLING for a lesser player that can’t drive in runs or have a high enough BA to convince you so you then LOWER THE BAR and look at OBP becuase it makes a player sound better. Nick Johnson had High OBP .388 but hit .167

Looking at OBP he sounds like a real winner. A real winner that Tejada OUT BATS!

The truth of the matter is if you loaded up every position with guys who hit .300 then you wouldn’t need OBP to score those runs. Get a lineup full of .300 hitting, 100 RBI guys and your likely to get the same 800 RS the Yankees have!
And because they hit AND drive in runs at ANY number in the lineup they also get on base a lot more than every other team because a pitcher is FORCED to pick his poison!

This is what I tried to get accross and probably why this subject hasn’t really been brought up since the last time we had it!
The Yankees lead OBP because they are GOOD HITTERS not good OBP guys. OBP is a RESULT not a CAUSE!

To use your examples above puddles don’t make rain! Rain makes Puddles!

If you want to discover what happened and project it into future potential you need to look at what CAUSED the numbers not just what resulted without any sense of how those results came about.

I believe that you don’t need a high OBP leadoff batter to win. You simply need a GOOD .300 batter and the OBP will take care of itself.

It is incosequential since it doesn’t even tell you what the ACTUAL result was.
that OB could have been a single, double triple or Homerun and it could even be a product of the pitcher losing it and hitting you!

Therefore attributing a player PLUS based on a result that may or may not be an actual accomplishment of the player is folly and OVER VALUING him based on situations not of his own making!

And that is my BIGGEST problem with OBP other than the non chalant use of it in every discussion on players despite the fact it really doesn’t say anything about the player’s ability to do what REALLY is important in the game of baseball….DRIVING IN RUNS!

Those runs are driven in at the plate not at the first base bag and the OBP crowd would like to say to get out of the conflicts with their OBP theory!

I get it you guys LIKE OBP and you WANT it to be the most important stat just as you LIKE the Mets and want them to be the most important team in baseball!

But what you want and what is real are two different things!
and settling for lesser over effective is the short path to failure!

It’s cold in the winter.

It’s wet when it rains.

Grass grows in the summer.

We’ve drafted thousands of players in the last 45 years and thats the best we can do? Whew. Man. Only in Government would this level of incompetence tolerated.

HERE are some facts.

The teams with the MOST RBI are ALWAYS the team with the highest RS.
The teams with the highest OBP are NOT!

It’s not the base that causes something to happen in an At Bat it is the PLAYER who does something IN THE BATTER’S BOX! that makes it happen!

And OB is not always an RBI but an RBI is almost ALWAYS an OB! (Excl Sac Fly and FC)

These are UNDENIABLE facts!
HISTORY BEARS IT OUT!
Look at the last three years hell look at the last 20!

The guys who score the most runs will ALWAYS have the most RBI and the guys who have the best OBP will not ALWAYS have the most RS.

Now go do some homework and show me examples where the low RBI but high OBP ALWAYS beats high RBI!

If you can’t you have pretty much just been proven wrong for something like the 10th time since I started posting here!

Still doesn’t matter it wasn’t him touching first that drove in the winning run. Thats the point that is lost on you!

And why you fail!

What ALLOWED ventura to touch the base?

THE HIT! Not 1B!

How many wins combined do those DEVELOP ONLY teams have?

I have showed my proof…
Time for you guys to start showing some numbers that make your point and if you don’t want to hear rediculous responses to your rediculous semantical attempts at making OBP a cause you wouldn’t get your logic non sensical logic thrown right back in your face!

Tag you say getting OB scores more runs but then you can’t explain why that isn’t true when Toronto is brought up.

X you cite RULES of sport and when similar situation that your used is thrown back at you you call it non sensical.

Well Thank you for admitting what you proposed was non sense!

X it’s not an out until the Umpire calls it so again does the Umpire cause the player to catch it?

This is what YOU are claiming by the saying OB caused the run to score!