Unconventional Wisdom: Who are today's best-hitting pitchers?

Story Highlights

Strikeout rate and extra-base hits are key in evaluating pitchers' hitting
Athleticism helps, too; and the younger the pitcher the better
Dontrelle Willis' value takes a hit with his move to the American League

Jake Peavy isn't just an ace pitcher -- he's a threat with the bat as well.

Doug Benc/Getty Images

Related Links

By Nate Silver, Baseball Prospectus

In the six years that I've generated PECOTA forecasts, I've never bothered to run hitting projections for pitchers. In fact I've regarded pitcher hitting as something of a nuisance; I specifically screen out any pitchers so that they won't be selected as comparable players. This isn't an aesthetic judgment by any means -- watching pitchers try (and fail) to hit is one of my favorite pastimes. But since even the pitchers who make 35 starts a year won't usually get more than 80 or 90 plate appearances, I've generally figured that it wasn't quite worth the trouble.

Still, if you aren't accounting for pitcher hitting, you're unambiguously cheating some players out of their value. For example, Micah Owings had a VORP of 16.5 last season, so his offense did more to contribute to his team's success than real-life hitters such as J.D. Drew, Ivan Rodriguez and Rafael Furcal. But how much of that performance was actual skill rather than a fluke of small sample size? Pitcher hitting suffers from the monkeys-typing-Shakespeare problem: Take enough pitchers, give them all 70 at-bats or so, and two or three of them are going to wind up hitting .320 with a couple of long balls, perhaps simply by a stroke of luck.

To address this question, I developed a regression-based system for projecting hitter performance that I'll call SPHPS (Simple Pitcher Hitting Projection System), which isn't a catchy anagram at all, but has the virtue of being a palindrome. This system is derived solely from the hitting statistics of pitchers; you don't want to include position players in the same dataset because then you'll regress toward the mean established by position players, when pitchers and position players are selected to play in the major leagues based on totally different skill sets. (The gap between pitcher and position-player hitting has grown steadily since the dawn of baseball time).

Without going into too much more detail about SPHPS, which isn't anything terribly sophisticated, here are a couple of tips to keep in mind when you're trying to find good-hitting pitchers:

Ignore batting average. Batting averages take long enough to stabilize, even when you have a full 600 or 700 plate appearances to work with. With pitchers you'll be lucky to get one-tenth that many, and there just isn't any hope for the same sort of stability in batting averages. Instead, focus on a pitcher's strikeout rate. If a pitcher can make some kind of contact, more often than not he's eventually going to leg out a couple of base hits.

In addition to strikeout rate the other big category to focus on is extra-base hits, and particularly home runs. As long as you're putting wood on the ball you're going to back into a base hit now and then, but getting an extra-base hit will usually require some kind of actual hitting skill.

The younger the pitcher the better. Pitcher hitting does not appear to peak at age 27, as you might see for a hitter. Instead it just gets worse the older a pitcher gets. This is undoubtedly because pitchers don't spend a lot of time working on their hitting once they turn pro, so there's nothing to compensate for the decline in raw athletic skill.

Athleticism helps. Being bigger and stronger is a positive indicator, and if a pitcher runs pretty well that's usually a good sign too.

The balance of this article will be devoted to identifying the 10 best-hitting pitchers in baseball as identified by SPHPS. The specific measure we use is the number of extra runs a pitcher produces relative to a league-average hitting pitcher, as derived from a version of the Marginal Lineup Value formula and assuming that the pitcher gets 80 plate appearances in a season -- roughly the number of plate appearances a pitcher should expect if he spends the whole year in the rotation and makes 32 or 33 starts). Minor league statistics are considered (through the Davenport Translations) and park effects are accounted for. (These projections reflect performance through 2007.)