Adam Jones and Success Without Walks

Jones has reached a new high — or low? — in 2014. Mandatory Credit: Joy R. Absalon-USA TODAY Sports

Adam Jones has never possessed what one might call “plate discipline”. Since the Mariners called him up in 2006, his walk rate of 4.5% is the fourth-lowest in the majors. Despite this, he’s performed pretty well at the plate overall, as his career wRC+ of 108 ranks 56th out of 87 qualifiers. This trend has ballooned in 2014: So far, he’s posted a 113 wRC+, good for 72nd out of 166 qualified batters, even though his abysmal 2.6% walk rate beats only two other players.

This seems rather unusual, so I decided to investigate. I looked at individual batter seasons over the past 30 years (i.e. back to 1985). I calculated a z-score — a number that measures how far something is from the major-league average — for each hitter’s walk rate. For the current season, Adam Jones had a z-score of -1.80 for his walk rate, meaning it’s 1.8 standard deviations below average.

First of all, not many players had worse figures than that — of the 4,388 in the sample, only 56 were more pathetic. But even fewer of them — six — hit at an above-average rate while eschewing free passes:

I included a few other stats too, to show that these hitters avoided strikeouts and/or hit the ball hard when they made contact (in Jones’s case, more of the latter), which compensated for their base-on-balls allergy.

If I broaden the scope, to z-scores of -1.5 or lower, a few more names show up, but it’s still a small, 37-man  list:

Jones’s 2010 and 2013 appear here as well, to show that this is not a one-year fluke.

Jones has played superbly for the Orioles as a whole — his 2.4 fWAR thus far ranks 21st in the majors. The methods by which he’s achieved this superiority, however, are as suspect as they are uncommon. If he wants to continue running with the big dogs, he’ll have to start taking a walk or two.

All data courtesy of FanGraphs, as of Friday, June 20th, 2014.