This series by no means will be an easy one for the Fish. The Rays are one of the elite teams in baseball, even though they come into this series as losers of seven of their past ten games. The series will be a low-scoring, good pitching series, and I for one am looking forward to that.

Per the usual, I had a chat with Robbie Knopf from Fansided’s Rays site, Rays Colored Glasses. Look for the game preview later tonight, right before the game. Here is the questions I answered for Robbie on his site. Here is a look at the chat I had with Robbie today:

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Bryan Smith: Better than good, [his rookie season has] been great. It’s unfair to compare him to those guys, because he has better on-base skills than either. He’s what those guys aspire to be.

Though Overbay and Loney are not the most illustrious names in baseball, both are players who have served as starters in the past for teams. However, both are, as Smith mentions, way out of Morrison’s league in terms of plate discipline and eye for the strike zone.

Inspired by that response by Smith, I decided to take a look at Morrison’s plate discipline numbers as shown by data provided by BIS to FanGraphs. Morrison has walked at a 15+% clip in his time in the majors in 2010, and it has a lot to do with how patient and discerning his eye at the plate is.

The Numbers

Here are the numbers compared to the career rates for the two players mentioned above, Overbay and Loney.

It’s quite clear just from a glance at this table that Loney does not even belong in this comparison; his game is more predicated towards making consistent contact rather than having an eye for the strike zone, as evidenced by the high OSwing% (swing% on pitches outside the zone). The comparison with Overbay, on the other hand, seems a bit more apt. Overbay has been more selective over the course of his career, but has swung a lot more when the ball has been in the zone. Morrison has been more passive at the plate, which has resulted in fewer strikeouts and more walks at the expense of balls in play. Overbay’s league-averge(ish) swing rate inside the zone is contributing to keeping his walks down as compared to Morrison.

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