Drew Stubbs has been striking out a lot this season. We all knew he had problems making contact, but this season it has been pretty rough to say the least, even by his standards. I have long contended that he takes too many pitches because ‘its his job as a leadoff hitter to take pitches’, but it works against him since he has trouble making contact at such a high rate. Guys like that should never take pitches just to take them, but should swing at pitches early and often that are good pitches. I began to write about the pitches Stubbs can’t hit, as my theory was that he couldn’t hit a slider in the bottom of the zone to save his life. So I charted all of his MLB pitches thrown to him and came up with these numbers:

As we can see, Stubbs really struggles against the offspeed stuff (small sample size of course, he has swung at all of 42 change ups or curveballs in his MLB career). But he really hits the fastball well, especially compared to the other pitches he faces. So I wanted to look more at how he did against just fastballs. I grouped Cutters, 2 seamers and 4 seamers all together as one group of ‘fastballs’ to make my life much easier here. I plotted every fastball that he took and got a hit on against his strikezone. Lets take a quick look at what the results look like:

As we can see with the help of my added ‘hot zone’ (where most of his hits seem to come from – or right down the middle, belt high), he took over 30 pitches that are touching that zone. The idea is out there that the leadoff batter should work the count and take pitches for the guys down the lineup, and in theory, that makes sense. But is that approach hurting Drew Stubbs, who is taking a large amount of pitches that he can hit and in turn hurting the Reds because he isn’t hitting them? I believe that if he were moved down in the lineup some, and told to be a little more aggressive early in the count, that we would see Stubbs start to make a little more contact and his numbers to go up.