SO BAD IT'S GOOD

The Reds' Christian Encarnacion-Strand is the best bad-ball hitter in the minors-by far

-  J.J. COOPER

Hitting a baseball is both extremely complex and mind-numbingly simple.

Hitting is the difficult act of trying to cover the strike zone against pitchers with top-end velocity, while also dealing with advanced game theory of trying to figure out which type of pitch a pitcher is going to choose.

And at the same time, it can be reduced to the simple motto of "hit strikes hard."

Christian Encarnacion-Strand in fact hits strikes hard, but the Triple-A Louisville first baseman has an even simpler approach. He just tries to hit everything hard.

That strategy shouldn't work. For almost everyone in baseball, it doesn't. This year, Encarnacion-Strand had swung at 41% of pitches that are well out of the strike zone. That would seem to be a recipe for disaster.

In the major leagues, these pitches are in areas defined as the chase zone and the waste zone. They are the pitches that are not even close to being strikes. They are pitches that are more than one ball's width out of the strike zone. On-base percentages are made on taking these pitches, but batting averages and slugging percentages go here to die.

This year, major league batters were hitting.092/.461/.115 on chase/ waste pitches. Since 2015, they had hit .104/.452/.132.

A full 31% of pitches are thrown in these zones, accounting for more than 83,000 pitches in the majors. s of mid-June.