Vladimir Guerrero and the Best Truly Bad Ball Hitters

Maybe the most painful part of writing about baseball for a living is that your biases — the same biases of which we’re all guilty — are constantly laid bare for everyone to see. Vladimir Guerrero reminded me of that problem most recently. David Wright and Joey Votto embody my first bias. Plate discipline was a way to find great hitters! I’d read Moneyball and used it to draft Chipper Jones first in my first fantasy league, back in 2001, and I was money. I had baseball all figured out. Good one, early 2000s dude. Good one. Watching Guerrero and someone like Brandon Phillips, though, I was reminded that I didn’t know everything. Here were guys that reached on pitches outside the zone and yet were so darn athletic that they made good contact on those pitches and were stars. I had to examine my ideal player, revisit my early bias, and try to focus on these players against whom I’d been biased. And I did so, publicly. Good thing it’s very hard to embarrass me. Back then, when I looked at guys with middling walk