Dominik85 posted:Generally the saying is that you can't walk to the show and often lower level walks don't translate to MLB unless you have power but more and more teams are loading up on high walk hitters and they even look for walk rates in college ball.
The As are most famous for it but the Astros, Dodgers and Cubs and other teams also have started to load up patient hitting prospect, some of them with fringy hitting tools.
is patience the new 6th tool? Or is big league walks more a combination from being feared and not chasing to many balls out of the zone and lower level patience means little for walking against elite pitchers?
The old saying was that you get toolsy hitters and they learn patience later but the experience shows that free swinging low minor hitters rarely learn patience and walk rates usually only decline above A ball ( although there are some exceptions), it seems to be hard to learn patience as an adult hitter.
on the other hand there are A ball walk machines with limited power, who don't translate their walks to high minors because guys who hit 11 bombs a year usually don't get walked a lot by MLB pitchers because they rather throw a couple down the pipe than giving up a walk to a singles hitter.
Baseball is a game of hitting a pitched ball. But if one can't get a ball pitched in the strike zone that a batter is supposed to swing at, then taking a walk and getting on base is a good thing. Swinging at bad pitches can result in getting on base too and most often it results in singles, which is really no different from taking a walk. Patience in getting a pitch that one can drive hard is what tends to produce productivity. And "productivity" is was really counts and why "power" is looked for rather than someone who's good at drawing walks. Power is only as good as it will be productive too. This is why just looking at things like BA's or OBP's isn't enough as a measure of productivity. One of the best stats for productivity is the OPS number, which will of course include the number of walks along with a batter's ability to hit with power. Walking and hitting just singles just isn't going to draw interest. . . unless one's BA is something like .900. 