Royals Review, a Kansas City Royals community

Fresh on the heels of my award-winning 2008 Royals O-Swing Percentage Graph, here is a graph the O-Swing (percentage of pitches swung at outside of the strike zone) for all the teams of the AL Central from 2005-2008 by year, also compared to the MLB average. Remember -- this is for hitters, so lower is better. (Maybe I [or someone else, of course] will do something like this for pitchers next week). The results speak for themselvs, I guess, but they are saying all sorts of things. Discuss and enjoy! For a larger version, click here (opens in new tab/window). Consider this a humble appendix to the "Secrets of the AL Central" series. All data via FanGraphs, of course.

Over at Royals Review, we were trying to list some of reasons to like some of the "New Guys" about whom some of us have... doubts. Anyway, I had heard that Mike Jacobs was a nice guy, but then someone asked me to quantify it. Well, Will Carroll swore me to secrecy on the super-duper awesome "niceness" metric that the Marlins front office let him in on, but I did manage to graph it in relation to his other skills, as pictured above. Click here for a larger version.

This is a graphical representation of (select) Royals 2008 O-Swing%, from Fangraphs. It gives the percentage of pitches outside the strike zone each hitter swings out. The implciations are obvious. The lower the better. In 2008, the MLB average was 25.4%. Click here for a bigger (and more readable) version of the graph. Three things to note: 1. I had to leave Jason Smith off because it made the graph impossible to read, since he was at 61.7%. 2. Mike Jacobs' O-Swing% for 2008 was 34.0%. 3. Seitzer's got his work cut out for him.

Love that Treyball: 147 straight trips to the plate without a walk for the boys in blue. The Royals have not drawn a walk since DeJesus drew a free pass in the finale of the Toronto series.