Ever since “Moneyball,” baseball’s gotten smarter about statistics. And I loved this story about how one pitcher on the New York Yankees is using stats to improve his performance:
James Paxton is a starting pitcher for the Yankees, not a statistics innovator. But during the 2018 season with the Seattle Mariners, before his off-season trade to New York, he found a novel way to measure his efficiency and aggressiveness on the mound.
Paxton, 30, asked the Mariners’ analytics department to give him a printout of a statistic he was tracking himself: the percentage of at-bats that, after three pitches, were either in a 1-2 count or already completed. He named the statistic A3P— After 3 Pitches — and monitors it often, rather than relying on more conventional statistics such as earned run average or wins and losses.
During a recent spring training meeting, Yankees coaches stressed the need to be aggressive. Paxton takes this to heart: He is among the best in baseball at throwing strikes. In addition to his A3P statistic, Paxton checks on the percentage of first pitches in each plate appearance that were strikes. His goal is to reach at least 70 percent; he was at 66 percent last season, according to Baseball-Reference.com.
“By thinking about this often, and if I can do it consistently, I’m putting myself in a good spot to have success,” he said.
This is fantastic. By giving Paxton the bigger picture — the team wants you to be more aggressive in the way you pitch — and then the stats to match it, they’re putting him in a position to succeed in 2019. And here’s the most important thing: These are stats that he can act on. If he sees his numbers dropping for A3P or first pitch strikes, he’ll know what he needs to do to improve his numbers. (Data that leads to specific action is the best kind of data.)