Tim Hyers, swing decisions, and misunderstandings

Hyers brings a new voice to the Braves' coaching staff, but maybe not a new idea.

Last week, Tim Hyers was, uh, engaged in employment to serve as the Braves’ hitting coach. Hyers’ resume is interesting for a few reasons. Over the last nine years, Hyers has bounced around three very well-regarded organizations - the Dodgers, Red Sox, and Rangers - and has won two World Series rings as hitting coach. Almost as impressively, Hyers hasn’t yet been fired. Each time he’s left a job, he’s left (at least on paper) of his own accord. This time, he’s leaving Texas to return home to Atlanta.

The man Hyers replaces, Kevin Seitzer, is emblematic of how impressive it is to go that long without ever being shown the door. Seitzer was fired one year removed from Atlanta fielding one of the most prolific offenses in recent history and three years removed from a World Series ring.

There are two ways to interpret Kevin Seitzer’s firing, at least until Alex Anthopoulos speaks publicly in the next few weeks. The first is the one that Seitzer conveyed to The Athletic’s David O’Brien the day his firing was announced: that he was fired because he felt as though he couldn’t effectively manage hitters’ psyche in a difficult year. In this version of the story, the front office isn’t moving on from an offensive philosophy; they’re just finding a new messenger for it. The second option is that Seitzer was fired because the Braves are meaningfully changing their offensive approach. On that note, Hyers’ public comments in the last week have drawn attention. Per Justin Toscano of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he talked about the importance of “scor[ing] runs in multiple different ways” - which could be interpreted as anything between “shortening swings with runners in scoring position and two strikes” and “more sacrifice bunts.” (The Rangers had the second-fewest sacrifice bunts in the big leagues this year, so I wouldn’t bet on the latter.) And there’s this:

“You’re only as good as the strikes you swing at,” Hyers said. “It’s basic. And I think you can break that down into two groups is chase percentage – can we eliminate some chase? – and what are we swinging at for our strengths, in parts of the zone? I think there’s some ways we can identify that to get players swinging at their pitches.”

This quote has gotten a lot of play, largely from people who seem to think it contrasts the way Kevin Seitzer coached Braves hitters - or, at least, the way those hitters adopted Seitzer’s coaching.

I think that this perhaps implicit comparison being drawn between Seitzer/’the old approach’ and Hyers/’the new approach’ is wrong. For starters, while Hyers’ comments are well taken, they’re not exactly controversial. Any hitting coach - Seitzer included - would tell you that it’s optimal to swing at a very high percentage of hittable pitches and take a very high percentage of unhittable pitches.

And beyond that, I don’t think people actually have a very good idea of what the Braves’ offensive approach looked like in 2024. So before we talk about whether Tim Hyers represents a departure from the Kevin Seitzer era, let’s figure out what he’d be departing from.

How do you measure a hitting approach?

The most common complaint I hear when the Braves are struggling to hit - for a few innings, a week, a month - is that they “don’t have a plan at the plate”. Well, what does a good plan look like? Hyers’ quote above actually serves as a good start: we want hitters spitting on pitches out of the zone and swinging at pitches in the zone. (More than that, we want hitters swinging at pitches in the sweet spots of their zone - but more on that later.)

Luckily for us, that’s pretty easy to quantify at a high level. We can measure Z-swing% - the percentage of in-zone pitches a team swings at - and O-swing% - the percentage of out-of-zone pitches a team swings at. We want a high Z-swing% and a low O-swing%. And when you calculate the difference between those numbers, you get a swing decision metric that links nicely to offensive outputs.

How did the Braves and Rangers stack up this year?

Let’s look at the leaderboard.

As you can see, the Braves were third leaguewide in Z-O swing% this year, just behind the soon-to-be champion Dodgers and . . . Tim Hyers’s Rangers. (By the way, while there are bad teams with good approaches and vice versa, would you rather be in the group “Dodgers, Rangers, Braves, Mariners, Cubs” or “Nats, Cardinals, Rays, White Sox, Astros” when it comes to offense?)

You’ll notice that Atlanta and Texas got to their excellent Z-O swing rates in different ways. Atlanta was the best leaguewide at swinging at strikes, which offset being eleventh-worst at laying off balls. Texas was fourth-best at swinging at strikes and tenth-best at laying off balls. The Rangers were one of only two teams - the other being the Dodgers - to finish in the top ten in both metrics.

What can we take away from this?

First of all, every team’s fans thinks their team is the worst at chasing bad pitches. For those of you who thought the Braves were singularly swing-happy, you should’ve watched more Marlins games! They swung at strikes nearly as often as the Braves did - and then swung at balls more than anyone else in the league. Despite trotting out dealing with injuries and slumps as the season went on, Tim Hyers’ old and new teams both made high-quality swing decisions. Would it have been even better if the Braves had chased at a lower rate? Absolutely. But as this list shows you, reducing O-swing% comes at the expense of reducing Z-swing%; it’s not like any of these hitters are trying to swing at balls. Tell them their job is to chase less at all costs and they’ll let some meatballs go by, too.

But Hyers’ initial comments suggested some interest in ensuring that hitters aren’t just swinging at strikes, but are swinging at strikes that fit within their hot zones. So maybe we’ll see a slight decreases in Z-swing% and O-swing% next year. The Rangers were still plenty aggressive in the zone - just not to Atlanta’s level. If Hyers thinks that he can coach Braves hitters to pick their spots more intelligently, the improvement in quality of contact (which is already very good) may be worth watching some strikes go by. And it might even come with a slight drop in chase rate.

Finally, there are aspects to hitting beyond swing decisions. Maybe Hyers will encourage hitters to shorten their swings in certain counts (though I’m not really sure the data supports that) or maybe he’s got new mechanical ideas. My thoughts here are more limited.

It’s important to remember that all of this is conjectural. Kevin Seitzer didn’t invent the Braves’ current hitting approach; he predates Anthopoulos and that approach. If someone in the front office is dictating the approach, maybe Hyers just becomes the person who’s responsible for communicating it. And all we have on Hyers’ approach are a few public comments and data from his past teams. At the end of the day, a hitting coach can only do so much; it’s not clear to what extent hitters are doing something because of or in spite of advice from the coaching staff.

But there’s no time for conjecture like the dead period between the end of the Braves’ season and the start of free agency.