Patience

I was writing this up as part of the upcoming series preview, but felt it needed its own post to help highlight the significance.

When I first heard about the Jack Hannahan trade, one of my favorite parts about it was his plate discipline. Actually, aside from the whole would-not-impress-us-with-his-hitting-even-at-LL-softball aspect of Hannahan's game, I loved every bit of the Hannahan trade. You should too. Hannahan rules.*

Anyways, back to my point. Hannahan takes lots of pitches and I was encouraged by that. Friday's game illustrated what I looked forward to so much. He struck out twice and walked twice, but even the walks were beside the point as he saw 22 pitches over his four plate appearances. I love it.

Ryan Langerhans is cut from a related, but much more awesome cloth, like silk to Hannahan's rayon. In that he also takes a lot of pitches. Those two have replaced (or mostly in Hannahan's case) Endy Chavez and Adrian Beltre, neither of the two great disciples of long plate appearances. All in all, here is a breakdown of our pitches seen per plate appearance, by month.

April: 3.63, 29th in MLB
May: 3.73, 23rd
June: 3.77, 23rd
July: 3.91, 13th

Ryan Langerhans joined us right when July began. Hannahan not long after. No, it is not solely the fruit of those two studly beings, but it is not important right now to figure out which Adonis to pin the medal of praise upon. It is just noteworthy that so far with our "new" semi-standard lineup, we have been running plate discipline numbers that put us in the top half of the league for the first time since that laughable early stretch to begin 2008.

* at things not directly related to making contact with pitches and putting them in play for hits.