The Pittsburgh Pirates haven't been great at the plate this year, and that's probably an understatement. Currently we are 50 games into the season and the team is hitting .236 altogether. I wanted to try and find out more about the struggles, so I compiled statistics for Pirates batting averages in each of the possible 12 counts a batter can face. I took the Pirates 12-main offensive contributors: Andrew McCutchen, Neil Walker, Jose Tabata, Lyle Overbay, Ronny Cedeno, Garrett Jones, Pedro Alvarez, Chris Snyder, Ryan Doumit, Matt Diaz, Steven Pearce, and Brandon Wood. Here's the breakdown:
That's enough numbers to give you a headache, so here's the totals for all 12 of these guys together:
You can see that the Pirates hit very well when they swing at the first pitch, hitting .344 on 0-0 counts. The offense has done a good job while ahead in the count (1-0, 2-0, 3-0, 3-1) with an average of .314, but has struggled mightily while behind in the count (0-1, 0-2, 1-2) with an average of .177. The Pirates are especially bad with 2 strikes on them, hitting .163 to this point.
The young Pittsburgh offense has let opposing pitchers exploit their holes too often this year. Once a pitcher gets ahead, the Pirates are very ineffective. That's not too big of a surprise with young hitters, as it can sometimes take a couple years for a hitter to correct some of the flaws that he has at the plate. We've seen that largely with Alvarez, who just can't seem to do anything with pitches on the outer half of the plate. As these young hitters mature, hopefully we'll start seeing them being more comfortable while behind in counts and expand their game to be able to do more things with more pitches.
To me, this means that the Pirates need to start being a little more aggressive early in counts. When they sit back and take 2 strikes, at bats aren't going to end well most of the time.
The Pirates are hitting .336 when they put one of the first 2 pitches of the at-bat in play. Right or not, I'm saying the Pirates should not be so tentative to swing early in counts, because we've seen them be extremely effective when they have done so thus far in 2011.
