Taking the Coach's Advice

I was perusing the my Yahoo Fantasy Baseball free agent list the other day, looking for catchers, when I came across Chris Iannetta. What caught my eye about Iannetta was his .373 OBP. This is really high, one of the highest in the whole league. I decided to click on Iannetta and learn a little more about the Rockies catcher. That is when the real surprise happened. I found out the Chris Iannetta is only batting .220. You read that right, his OBP is .153 points higher than his AVG. This is crazy! Obviously Iannetta took his little league coach's advice about a walk being as good as a hit to heart.

Seeing Chris Iannetta's huge differential got me wondering about the differences between OBP and AVG in the major leagues. Of qualified leaders, who has the biggest difference? Are there any other players in the league that suck at hitting the baseball, but still manage to find their way on base at eye popping rates? To find out i turned to fangraphs. Figure 1 shows a a list of all qualified leaders who have at least a .100 point difference between OBP and AVG.

Figure 1

The answer to the first question, who has the largest difference between OBP and AVG, doesn't surprise me. Jose Bautista is having a monster year. He is batting .336 and had 31 hr by the all-star break. This means opposing teams are terrified on of (proof reading is for chumps) him, which leads to lots of walks, both intentional and unintentional.

The real surprise to me is the answer to the second question. There are several other players who are crappy at hitting, but who still manage to get on base, like Chris Iannetta. Carlos Santana (maybe he IS the same person as the guitar player, it might explain the hitting), Mark Reynolds, Carlos Pena and Jayson Werth all own low AVG with much higher OBP. However, the ultimate differential belongs to Adam Dunn, who is hitting a measly .160, but still managing to get on base at a .292 clip. Looking deeper into Adam Dunn's stats I came to the conclusion that he has just quit swinging the bat. Dunn has a BB% of 14.6 and a K% of 36.3. Combined that is 50.9% of his plate appearances where he fails to put the ball in play, amazing!

Sources: Fangraphs