ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the effect of the ball/strike count on the behavior of players and umpires and on the final outcome of a plate appearance. When watching a broadcast of a baseball game, one often hears an announcer’s concern for a pitcher who is repeatedly “falling behind” in the count, or his/her anticipation for a particular pitch because it’s a “hitter’s count” and the batter has a chance to do some damage. The Baseball Reference website provides various splits for every player—in particular, it gives splits by ball/strike counts for all seasons since 1988. Sequence strings from Retrosheet often require some initial processing before they can be suitably analyzed. The chapter provides a quick tutorial on some R functions for the manipulation of strings. A contour plot is an effective alternative method to visualize batters’ swinging preferences. This type of plot is used to visualize three-dimensional data in two dimensions.
