Hitting, Not Walking, to a Batting Title

Among batting title recipients this century Tim Anderson is unique. Tim, unlike those title winners of the 2000’s that came before him, simply doesn’t walk much. Before running through his season though, here’s glance at this century’s batting title winners as a group.

Since the year 2000, batting title recipients have by and large been possibly what you might expect: hitters who limit the times they strike out and are capable of drawing walks. The “average” batting champion walked 72 times and struck out 84 times on his way to hitting .345. The median title season was similar: 67 walks, 84 strikeouts, and a .343 average. Below is a chronological table that lists those winners.

So Tim Anderson, like the rest of those players listed above, had a great season. But as we will get to, he wasn’t completely typical for a batting title winner. That said, he is more typical today than he would have been a decade ago, based on league-wide trends. As shown below, batting titles are being claimed with lesser batting averages than they were previously.

In the figure above, Tim Anderson appears to very clearly fit into a larger trend. And that isn’t to dilute his season: he hit higher than 2019’s National League batting title winner, Christian Yelich. He hit higher than AL winner Michael Young did (.331) nearly a decade and a half ago. But the overall tapering trend is clear.

Don’t think any less of batting title winners despite this general trend though. It is harder than ever to consistently put the ball in play and make quality contact while doing so. The figure below highlights that trend in league-wide batting averages, which largely mirrors the decline of those winners above.

So Tim Anderson hit with an average you might expect from a batting champion in 2019, in a tougher landscape for getting on base. Where Anderson does lie at the margins for winners is in BB/K ratios.

All season Anderson racked up strikeouts, but along with those strikeouts came hits at a rate unmatched in 2019. By the All Star break, Anderson had just 7 walks. In 20 June games (all starts) he didn’t walk a single time. By seasons end, Tim Anderson had the second lowest walk rate in MLB, sandwiched between Kevin Pillar (lowest) and Hanser Alberto.

But he hit. He hit against left handed pitchers (.326) and he hit against right handed pitchers (.339); Anderson hit at home (.325) and he hit on the road (.345). He hit while swinging at more than three-quarters of pitches thrown to him in the zone (77.6%) and he hit while swinging at nearly half the pitches he saw outside of the zone (46.2%). 

There wasn’t always success on a pitch-to-pitch basis though. While each of his aforementioned swing rates ranked in MLB’s top fifteen, he didn’t hit the top 30 in either in-zone (31st among qualifiers) or out-of-zone contact rates (91st of 135). His performance, while nevertheless impressive, was aided by his season-long .399 BABIP, second only to his teammate Yoan Moncada’s own .406 percentage. 

So after a season full of hits and strikeouts, but largely devoid of bases on balls, Tim Anderson winds up here:

As one might imagine, there exists a general positive relationship between BB:K ratios and batting averages among batting title winners. 12 of 40, or 30%, of batting title seasons were marked by a greater than 1:1 BB:K ratio.

Tim Anderson, or rather the point of which represents his 2019 season, lies lowest in the figure above. His ~1:7 BB to K ratio is easily the most imbalanced of any displayed above; the median ratio of walks to strikeouts is .788, or roughly 4:5 for batting title winners this century.

While his BB:K ratio is the lowest of any player above, Anderson’s batting average wasn’t even in the bottom quartile. That is what makes his season so remarkable in part.

Anderson, for an entire season, managed to leverage his aggressive batting tactics into average and production with truly impressive bottom line results. In translating his extreme approach to success he lends himself more to the Javier Baez mold than that of Rougned Odor. Whether his season is replicable is a question for another time, but the hardware is his and no one can say he didn’t earn it.