Estrada Hit Chart

So TheJay keeps requesting them and I am going to keep posting them. Again, if anyone has a player they would like to see please leave a comment below. Also, I am getting close to getting the release point of the pitch normalized for each park. Since all quantities depend solely on the initial conditions this should be very useful. Hopefully today or tomorrow I will be blogging about that with some numbers for people to use. The velocity normalization is going to be harder to do but I do have an idea on that. The acceleration will be very tricky and may not be possible with the data we currently have. Anyway, on to Estrada.

Estrada is a hitter that swings at a lot of pitches and makes a lot of contact. For a long time this year he was swinging at the first pitch over 50% of the time. I'm not sure if he is still doing that but here are the results from pitchFX for all of the pitches to Estrada.

So I have combined the hit chart and the strike chart into one and added foul balls. This plot is very busy but if you click on it it will enlarge and look a lot better. Estrada is a switch hitter so you would have to assume most of those strike calls there were off the plate came from him batting left handed. Estrada is mostly a singles hitter with a little power mixed in mostly down and away when he is batting left handed. What about him swining at the first pitch?

Estrada appears to be laying off more first pitches recently and because most of his pitchFX data has come recently he appears to be more patent than he really has been over the whole year. Almost all of his power comes swinging at the first pitch so it appears that he is swinging very hard when he does swing. Most of his swinging strikes came out of the zone and most of his foul balls came in the zone. Honestly with his track record I am shocked that pitchers continue to give him first pitch fastballs in the zone. If he is going to burn you it most likely is on that first pitch and starting him off with offspeed stuff out of the zone seems like a good bet to me.