Pitchers at the Plate - Who Cares!

One of the draft strategies I employed this year was targeting pitchers that had some ability at the plate.  As far as I can tell this was a poor strategy, mainly due to the random variation of so few relative at bats.  Teams are averaging about 280 at bats for their entire pitching staffs and when you compare that to 3800 at bats for the rest of the lineup, the impact is marginal. With so few at bats, even the best hitting pitcher of all time can have a poor 50 AB stretch, wrecking all potential gain from the strategy.  Alternatively, the worst hitting hurler can have a great 50 AB stretch too.

Taking it one step further, I was able to target 3 starting pitchers who truly showed very good  real life stats, but they have comprised only 30% of all my pitcher at bats and 7% of my total at bats.  It's more than noise in the grand scheme of things, but not much.

Below is a quick chart that depicts OPS scores for all batters and pitchers by team.  The best hitting staff in the game belongs to John McDonald Fanclub.  Led by Bob Caruthers (.364 / .486 / .600) and Jim Tobin (.270 / .300 / .350) Jason B has set the standard.  Interestingly, these two hardly pitch at all, rather, their AB's are coming from pinch hitting duties.

Excluding John McDonald, the next best team is Colorado.  Al Orth is batting .240 / .230 / .240 and The Big Train .210 / .240 / .340

If interested, here is a complete list of totals for each team - pitcher vs batter.