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Sabermetrics Glossary: O-Swing Percentage

Sabermetrics Glossary: O-Swing Percentage

O-Swing%, sometimes called Chase Rate is a plate discipline metric. The calculation is the number of out of the zone pitches a hitter swings at divided by the total number of out of the zone pitches the hitter faces. This statistic shows you what hitters are best and worst at identifying strikes and balls.

The league average is 30%, with the lowest values being just above 14% and the highest values being just below 52%. Here is a histogram of every O-Swing% posted over the last five years (with a 200 plate appearance minimum). The swing percentages are on the x-axis, and the frequencies are on the y-axis. The higher the bar, the more hitters there were that fell into that range of o-swing%.

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The most disciplined hitters will still swing at a ball something like 20% of the time, and even the most free-swinging hitters will lay off well over half of the balls they see.

So what good is this? The answer lies in correlation. Let’s explore with a scatter plot.

This scatter plot plots each hitter’s o-swing% on the x-axis and their walk rate on the y-axis. This is a good visual way to see how one variable affects another. You can see from this visual that as o-swing% increases, the walk rate typically decreases. Of course, that makes intuitive sense, since the way to draw a walk is to not swing at pitches out of the zone.

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