Twinsies

It's the day after Thanksgiving, which means I'm still away for Thanksgiving, and which means many of you are still away or hosting for Thanksgiving, which means I'm not really expected to post anything on the website. But I also start to feel guilty the longer I go without posting anything on the website, so now I am writing this post on the website. Consider this post a compromise between a real post and no post at all. This post is the Jake Woods of blog posts. I hope that you are accordingly excited.

Earlier this morning I was thinking a little bit about Carlos Peguero, for no other reason than holy crap can you believe that happened, this season? I mean, man, you talk about overmatched. The power was obvious - I do not think the power could have been more obvious by much - but the unreadiness was also obvious. I am being completely honest when I say I can't remember seeing a position player with worse discipline in the Major Leagues. Maybe there have been some that I forgot, but Peguero nevertheless occupied the extreme.

Curious, I went to FanGraphs and exported the plate discipline numbers for every batter that came to the plate at least 150 times this season. I narrowed the resulting spreadsheet down to Name, O-Swing%, Z-Swing%, and Contact%. I then created a pretty simple formula to figure out which batters had the most and least similar approaches to Peguero's, at least in terms of those statistics.

Out of a pool of 404 batters, the batter with the least similar approach to Carlos Peguero's was Nick Punto. Punto beat out Daric Barton, Bobby Abreu and Sam Fuld, and by a pretty healthy margin. I probably couldn't have faked a better answer. If you took Carlos Peguero, trapped him, put him in a Human Trait Reversanator, and collected the result, you'd get Nick Punto.

And, out of a pool of 404 batters, the batter with the most similar approach to Carlos Peguero's was Miguel Olivo.

Which player is which in the table? The answer is that it doesn't matter. The two even ended up with similar batting lines - one hit .196/.252/.371, while the other hit .224/.253/.388. Olivo in particular is so allergic to the concept of the pitcher putting him on that more pitches hit Carlos Quentin in 2011 than have hit Miguel Olivo since 2005.

This is the time of year that we're supposed to express those things for which we're thankful. I'm not going to write out a list of the things for which I'm thankful, because none of you guys give a shit. Instead, I'll say that Miguel Olivo should be most thankful that he's a catcher.