But I was just responding to the list of players from 50 years ago that you provided. Some of those guys, Altuve, Andruw Jones, Kemp, Jermaine Dye, are modern players. If you think we should limit the scope of the comparisons to those players that seems fair. Their EYE ratios in their second year would look like this...
Zunino---4%/33%
-Altuve---6%/12%
-Jones---12/23, but 11/15 in his age 23 season
-Kemo---5/21 (and I said this was probably one of the better comps, but he posted K's rates much lower in the upper minors)
-Dye---6/18
-Pudge---5/16 at age 21, 7/10 by age 23
These guys just aren't in the same class as Zunino in terms of hitter types.
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I'm confused by the notion that K's aren't detrimental to hitters. If I take two guys, both with a 5% walk rate, 200 ISO, 300 BABIP, but one has a 21% K rate and the other a 33% K rate, how can the latter possibly equal the production of the former? I think you are saying that SABR minded people don't mind K's as long as they OVERCOME it with something else, like BB's or SLUG %. If so, definitely, there has been a shift in thinking in baseball regarding this. But taken at face value, given two otherwise equal players, you'd always take the guy with the lower K rate, correct? Could you clear up what you meant by that?
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Bottom line for me is this. Mike Zunino is currently tied for the worst K% in baseball among all qualified players, a list which includes 163 players. Whatever you want to say about era, thinking inside the game changing, selling out for power, whatever, there's just no way around that being what it is. If he had a good walk rate to go with it, that would be one thing. He is 156th out of those 163 players in BB%. There's just no two ways around it. His eye ratio is worst in baseball in 2014 among qualified players. Literally, the worst. It would have been the worst last year as well by a wide margin. He has a loooong ways to go to even consider approaching the types of names you listed.
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