Armchair Hitting Coach: To Pull or Not To Pull?

There is a particularly annoying Post-Game Thread over on MCC from yesterday's game in which the author(not Grant, BTW) acknowledges a great game by Madison Bumgarner, then proceeds to ask a lot of whiny questions designed, I think, to show up the ineptness of the Giants.  In the process, though, the author raises an interesting question that I have been pondering myself in the last few days, but from a far different perspective.

The paragraph started with a comment from Bill Schroeder, who was the color guy on the Fox Broadcast yesterday, and who I thought did a pretty good job of analyzing the game.  In response to Buster Posey's RBI single up the middle, Schroeder had said, "Just don't pull that ball.  You pull a ball, you wind up putting it on the ground."  The post author then pointed out that Melky Cabrera had "pulled" a ball to the left-center gap for a triple and Madison Bumgarner had pulled a ball down the LF line an inning earlier for an RBI.  Then came this gem:  "The point I'm trying to make is ALL THE GIANTS DO IS PULL THE BALL.  THAT IS THE ENTIRE APPROACH. THE HITTING MEETING BEFORE EACH SERIES IS JUST A BUNCH OF GUYS SITTING AROUND A TABLE WHILE BAM BAM POINTS TO A DRY ERASE BOARD WITH ONLY THE WORD "SWING" WRITTEN ON IT.  The first 4 innings of this game was a tribute to weak contact and could've been photographed and put in a book called the Joy of Pull.  Their "swing first" approach is just...well, let's all be thankful that Randy Wolf decided to hang some curveballs."

Now, I'm not going to dwell on the fact that balls hit from alley to alley are not pulled.  I'm not going to dwell in the fact that Melky Cabrera, Buster Posey, Pablo Sandoval and Angel Pagan are not pull hitters and neither are Brandon Crawford, Joaquin Arias, Hector Sanchez, Emmanuel Burriss, Ryan Theriot or Brett Pill.  I think you get my point. If Aubrey Huff is the embodiment of the Giants approach at the plate, then yes, they might be a pull happy team, but who else on the team tries to pull the ball down the line almost every AB?  I will also briefly point out that "swing first" and "pull" are not synonyms in hitting vernacular, but I'm not going to dwell on that either.

What I've been thinking about lately, and this post brought to the forefront of my brain, is that maybe, just maybe, the Giants and many other teams in baseball need to be pulling the ball more rather than less.  Aaron Rowand and Aubrey Huff have complained, sometimes bitterly, about "Triples Alley" at AT&T Park, pointing out that there is more to it than the 421 foot distance to the wall.  The other problem with it is that right fielders take away that alley by playing way over to the left and deep.  They concede the RF line completely, knowing that it's shallow enough and they can get over fast enough to hold hitters to no more than a double and often a single on balls hit all the way to the wall.  The the other night on the TV broadcast, Kruk used a telestrator to show how the defense of an OPPOSING team was bunched in the center of the field cutting off both alleys.  He commented that this defensive alignment is becoming increasingly common because almost all hitters nowadays swing for the middle of the field.  Now, you would think that if the opposing team thought the Giants were all dead pull hitters.....oh sorry, I said I wasn't going to dwell on it.  In other words, unless you are Melky Cabrera and can absolutely smoke it into those gaps, you are not going to hit many XBH's up the alley these days.  Couple that with the difficulty in hitting HR's to the center of AT&T and hitting the ball to the center 3'rd of the park is likely to result in a lot of long outs.

Of course, any time a defense over-covers one area of a field, it opens up other areas.  First of all, it opens the 2 outer thirds of the field.  Secondly, it just might be easier to hit the ball out of the park down the lines in AT&T than it is to CF and the alleys.  The problem is, the art of pulling the ball seems to have been lost somewhere.  In my distant memory, I seem to remember a lot of "dead pull" hitters who were quite successful.  Maybe it's the pitchers riding the outside corners.  Maybe it's evolution of the cut fastball.  I don't really know.  I just know that as MLB defenses pinch off the corners and as more ballparks have a straight CF fence that extends the power alleys, opportunities are being created for pull  and poke hitters, pull the ball down the line or poke it down the opposite field line.  This brings us to a Blast From the Past:  Darrell Evans.

Darrell Evans is a guy who played for the Giants from 1977-1983.  That was the middle third of his career.  The first third was played with the Atlanta Braves and the last third with the Detroit Tigers.  Bill James has called Darrell the most underrated player in baseball history.  I remember not thinking much of Darrell Evans when he played for the Giants.  I've always been overly enamored by players with high batting averages.  Of course, my ideal hitter is a Willie Mays or Barry Bonds who hit for both high batting averages and hit a lot of HR's, but given the choice between, say, Darrell Evans and Bill Madlock, I've always gravitated to the Bill Madlocks.  In my rational consciousness through the education of sabermetrics, I have learned that batting average is largely an empty stat, although I do think it is underrated by many in the sabermetrics community.  For an equal OBP, a hit is better than a walk, but I digress.  Let's just say that I greatly underrated Darrell Evans too.

Darrell Evans was as dead a pull hitter as ever played the game.  I looked up his HR Log on Baseball Reference and found that of his 414 career HR's, 234 were hit to either straight away RF or down the RF line, in other words, between the 304 and 365 ft signs in RF in AT&T Park.  117 were hit to unknown locations.  Less than 70 were hit to the middle third of the ballparks.  Evans absolutely killed pitches on the inner half of the plate.  He didn't swing at pitches on the outer half unless he had to, and did not swing at pitches outside the strike zone.  I do remember that he hit a lot of balls down the line that were long enough to be HR's but went harmlessly foul.  He only had 2 seasons with a BA above .265, but had a career OBP of .361.   You'd think he was a "true outcome" guy but only had 3 seasons in which he struck out more than 100 times.  You would also think he "rolled over" a lot of balls, but he only had a couple of seasons with 10 or more GIDP's.   He finished a 21 year career with a line of .248/.361/.431 with 414 HR's.  Probably not a HOF career but a very valuable one(Bill James makes a very convincing case that if Tony Perez is in the HOF, then Darrell Evans should be too).

I've often wondered what kind of career Darrell Evans would have playing his home games in AT&T Park.  Candlestick was an extreme pitcher's park, but the prevailing wind was to RF.  How much did that help him?  Would the breeze that comes up off McCovey Cove knock down those pulled HR's and keep them in the park, or would they blow even more into foul territory?  Maybe, just maybe he would have been the perfect AT&T Park hitter, confounding those RF's who cheat into Triples Alley.  You see, Darrell Evans would never hit balls into Triples Alley!

PS:  One more interesting tidbit on Darrell Evans.  It remains unknown what the count was on most of Darrell Evans' HR's, but of the ones that are known, he hit the most on the first pitch of the AB, 0-0, and hit as many on the first pitch of the AB as in 3-2 and 3-1 counts combined.  Being a selective hitter and drawing a lot of walks is not necessarily the antithesis of being aggressive early in the count.