Batter vs Pitcher Matchups

Ownage charts

We routinely plot the seasonal trends of popular batter/pitcher matchups. Called Ownage Charts, they're a quick way to see which way the trend is headed. On each chart, the closer the OPS line gets to a player's name, the more ownage and bragging rights. For context, there's also a horizontal line that denotes the league-wide OPS of about .750. A minimum of 5 plate appearances in a given season is required to qualify for the chart.

Click on the link below each chart for all the details on each match-up.

More about our philosophy

Baseball's an individual sport with team goals and nothing's a better example of that than an at bat. A batter could miss a curve by 2 feet then crush a ball 400 ft the very next time up. Most baseball fans (minus the degenerate gamblers) love that unpredictability. On the flip side, there are plenty of statistical models that can be applied to the game, especially when you try to predict what will happen with a specific batter and pitcher combo.

Ownage charts attempt to aggregate all the existing matchup data between two players and, in time, will predict the likely outcomes of future at-bats. And, of course, the more existing data, the better the predictive model. For now, they're a quick glimpse of the performance of two popular players that are likely to face one another multiple times from the same division.