Every Friday I’m going to post a graph focusing on one player. This is a trial, and I am open to suggestions.
Today we take a look at Zach Britton, who is almost duplicating his 2009 season. His strikeout and ground ball ratios are down a bit, his hit ratio has gone up slightly, but his walk rate has fallen as well, keeping his K/BB at about the same level as last year. His strikeout rate has some room to come down because of the amount of ground balls that he gets. I talked to him at spring training and he told me that ground balls are the key, and while the strike outs are nice, he knows that ground ball outs make him a more efficient pitcher.
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Very nice to see a young arm with consistency. Met him at Bowie last night, and it doesn’t hurt that he has a great personality and was more than willing to interact with fans. Glad to also see the part he says about ground balls being key. The top pitchers are not necessarily strikeout pitchers, but can be stars otherwise. Bergesen, in his outstanding rookie campaign, went 7-5 in 19 starts with a 3.43 ERA, but only about 3.4 strikeouts per outing. The key? A .265 batting average against, owning a killer sinker that induced way too many ground balls (not sure on that stat or a way to look it up, somebody pick me up here). And he even had a 2.03 K/BB in ’09, showing that even without many Ks, he could keep the walks down and be a solid pitcher. Can’t wait to see next year or later this season if he can keep up this kind of stuff in AAA.
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