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Paul Goldschmidt gets to a 3-0 count more often than any other regular player in MLB. That shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Goldschmidt is dangerously powerful and impressively patient. Pitchers don’t challenge Goldschmidt in the zone until they have to, and Goldschmidt doesn’t expand his strike zone unless he has to. Of the 184 batters who have seen at least 1,500 pitches this season, only 10 have swung less often than Goldschmidt.

Next on the same list—highest percentage of all plate appearances reaching a 3-0 count—is Bryce Harper. If you’re familiar with Harper’s approach, that’s more of a surprise. Harper swings at the first pitch roughly 38 percent of the time, which puts him firmly in the top quintile of the league, and it’s awfully hard to rack up a large number of 3-0 counts when taking such an aggressive tack early in counts. Of course, the twist is that Harper has such devastating, terrifying power that pitchers hardly ever challenge him. No batter has seen more than 311 pitches this season and had a lower percentage of them pass through the zone. (Harper has seen over 2,300.) When Harper doesn’t swing at the first pitch, the ratio of 1-0 to 0-1 counts is 2.75-to-1. We’ll come back to both Harper and Goldschmidt before we’re through here.

Back to this list. You’ve gotten the first two names. I mean, I gave them to you, but if I had just asked you to guess who sees 3-0 counts the most often, they’d both be on your list of 10. They might even be on your list of five. Now we have some fun. Because the next two guys on the list wouldn’t be on your list of 30, and if you say they would be (unless you’re a fan of the teams for which they play), you’re a liar. Right here, third and fourth on the list of batters who see the most favorable possible hitter’s count the most often, below Goldschmidt and Harper but above Joey Votto, David Ortiz, and Miguel Cabrera, sit Adam Lind and Stephen Vogt. Today, we’re going to talk about how that’s possible, and what happens once those guys get to those counts.

First of all, here’s how Lind and Vogt are getting to 3-0 with such regularity:

Percentage of PA

League Average

Adam Lind

Stephen Vogt

Swinging at First Pitch

28.9

18.0

14.2

Going to 1-0 Count

38.7

44.9

43.8

Going from 1-0 to 2-0

33.4

43.1

43.3

Going from 2-0 to 3-0

30.0

41.2

44.3

(All figures except first-pitch-swing rate adjusted to strip out intentional walks)

Lind and Vogt don’t strike special fear into the hearts of opposing pitchers. Vogt is patient, but not excruciatingly so: He swings about as often as Joe Mauer. Lind swings about as often as Andrew McCutchen and Harper. Their tendency to reach a lot (a whole lot) of favorable counts comes from something more subtle than raw swing or zone rates. It’s all about the fact that both Lind and Vogt get more patient as they get farther ahead in the count. They’re not inclined to jump at the ball or read fastball and swing indiscriminately. To the contrary, the way guys like Votto and Harper calmly attack a pitch whenever they feel they have the advantage, looking for an extra-base hit, Lind and Vogt get aggressively passive when they get deep in a good count, looking to draw a walk.

Here’s the proof: Stephen Vogt has never swung at a 3-0 pitch in a big-league game, and Lind hasn’t done so in over six years. In fact, Lind has seen 233 such pitches in his MLB career, but only swung at four of them, all in a short stretch from late 2008 through mid-May 2009. During that phase, Lind was experimenting with a different approach to the plate, one wherein he thought more the way the elite hitters we talked about above think when they get ahead. That didn’t work for him, though, because Lind isn’t one of those hitters. He’s very good, but his swing—the bat speed, the feel for meeting the ball with the barrel, the hand-eye coordination—isn’t the machine-like force that Harper’s and Votto’s and Goldschmidt’s are.

Percentage of PA

Lind 2013, Toronto

Lind 2014, Toronto

Lind 2015, Milwaukee

Swinging at First Pitch

13.2

13.5

18.0

Going to 1-0 Count

41.1

46.7

44.9

Going from 1-0 to 2-0

33.0

27.9

43.1

Going from 2-0 to 3-0

28.6

24.4

41.2

(All figures except first-pitch-swing rate adjusted to strip out intentional walks)

It seems that in Toronto, Lind was coached and coaxed to try to become the next Votto, or even Jose Bautista. The Blue Jays’ shtick of late has been to turn everyone into a deadly power hitter, and to their credit, it’s worked more than once. It wasn’t working for Lind, though, because he doesn’t have the elite hitting skill to maximize the value of that way of approaching hitting.

The Brewers have set Lind free. He’s posted a .305 TAv so far this season, which would be his highest since 2009. He’s posting the best strikeout-to-walk ratio of his career, and his approach at the plate is one he should be able to execute into his mid-30s. Specifically, the idea is this: Lind can make consistent contact. He’s not a big swing-and-miss guy, and in fact, makes contact on 79.4 percent of swings. (Vogt makes contact over 81 percent of the time.) If a 3-0 count goes to 3-1 or even 3-2, Lind can feel okay about his chances of working out of that. On the other hand, because he’s never been one who consistently strikes the ball so violently that he can be defense-proof, Lind accepts some risk every time he swings with the count in his favor, risk that he will make a regrettable, avoidable out.

Of course, if Lind truly felt he was unlikely to see a better pitch for the rest of the at-bat, he’d likely swing at some 3-0 offerings. Either experience or data has informed him that he shouldn’t do so, though, and he’s not misinformed. The gif below shows the locations of all the pitches Lind has seen this season in 1-0, 2-0, 3-0, and 3-1 counts. The sample size dwindles from significant to modest, of course, but it’s easy enough to see the gist: Lind is right to think that waiting out a pitcher who’s fallen behind him will lead eventually to a great pitch to hit, if not to a walk before that happens.

Bryce Harper whiffs on nearly 28 percent of his swings. Two-strike counts are less comfortable for him. Conversely, it doesn’t take a perfect pitch or perfect knowledge of what’s coming for Harper to knock one into next week. Given Harper’s supernal power and quickness, and given his unabashedly aggressive swing, he has a strong incentive to swing as soon as he feels the count favors him. Votto has swung at 12 pitches in 3-0 counts this year (out of 56) because he has excellent bat control and knows that if he makes contact, the ball is going to be well struck and is likely to be a hit. For the likes of Lind and Vogt, though, it doesn’t make sense to pass up an opportunity to get way ahead in a count. It doesn’t even make sense to swing once they get there. Doing so is just throwing away perfectly good walks. There are a whole lot of hitters who, if they can recognize themselves as either a Harper type or a Lind type, could benefit from reassessing their approach to being ahead in the count. In terms of managing an at-bat to suit not only what the opposing pitcher is doing, but one’s own skill set, Lind and Harper are about equally on point.

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