Pete Alonso and the problem of chasing low and/or away

In the 21st Century you simply don’t see power hitters who don’t rack up big strikeout numbers. Gone are the days when Joe DiMaggio could hit 46 HR while only striking out 37 times, like he did in 1937. Instead, it’s much more common to see someone like Kyle Schwarber, who hit 47 HR in 2023 while striking out 215 times. Which brings us to Pete Alonso.

In 2023, Alonso hit 46 HR and struck out 151 times. The strikeouts in a vacuum aren’t a big problem. But it’s alarming how they come, or at least it is to me. If a pitcher beats you with velocity or paints the corners with his offspeed stuff, all you can do is tip your cap. But when you flail at pitches with no chance of hitting them, that’s where it gets frustrating to me.

The great pitchers get batters to swing at pitches way out of the strike zone because they look like strikes out of their hand. But at some point, hitters have to realize that they’re letting run-of-the-mill pitchers get them out with non-competitive pitches that were never going to be strikes, because they were so eager to swing the bat.

It seems to me that Alonso suffered from chasing low and/or away much more often in 2023 than in previous years. What follows is an attempt to figure out how often he chased these pitches. Baseball Savant has a terrific thing where they show the video results of every at-bat for every player. They have an 8-10 second video of how every AB ends. This will allow us to look at Alonso’s swinging third strikes and see what they looked like.

According to the Play Log at FanGraphs, Alonso struck out looking 33 times last year, meaning he went down swinging 118 times. How many of those were when he chased bad pitches? Baseball Savant has a 9×9 strike zone grid, along with four additional quadrants of pitches outside of the zone. Here’s what it looks like:

I went thru his strikeouts and separated out the video of the ones that fell into the bottom two quadrants outside of the strike zone. There were 61 of his strikeouts that came on pitches out of the zone low and/or away. That’s 52% of his strikeouts swinging. Here’s an example of what one looks like:

My plan was to show you every strikeout on these types of pitches but the video file (9:08) was too big for my hosting site. If you’re interested, you can view that video at — https://drive.google.com/file/d/1r64r8atnbcSyFHXaUzJ4xehOqNdD7bMw/view?usp=sharing

My opinion is that it would be worth it for Alonso to take more pitches with two strikes, have more strikeouts looking and fewer whiffs on lousy pitches. It’s completely unreasonable to imagine that he could eliminate these types of strikeouts. But what if instead of 61 Ks on these pitches, he cut that total in half?

Someone with as much experience in the big leagues that Alonso has should be aware of how pitchers are trying to get him out. It’s a thin line between making better swing decisions and being too passive at the plate. We want Alonso swinging the bat. We just don’t want him swinging at trash as often as he does.