Pwn3d - Mike Schmidt

It is time for another installment of Pwn3d, where we dissect the statistics and figure out which pitchers padded Mike Schmidt’s stats or tore him to pieces. Unlike the previous Gwynn and Boggs posts, when dealing with a slugger like Schmidt, one cannot look at batting average alone. Therefore, the selections may be a little more subjective. 

Even though batting average is not the harbinger for Schmidt, let’s get the formalities out of the way. Mike hit over .400 against 16 pitchers during his career (minimum 20 PA), while batting under .200 against 34 pitchers. This gives old Schmidty a Williams to Medoza ratio of 0.47. But heck, who went to see Mike Schmidt play with the hopes of him slapping a single into right field? Absolutely no one, because we watched Mike for the dingers, and good gracious did he deliver.

However, like peanut butter is to jelly, home runs come with strikeouts. Lots of strikeouts. In fact, Schmidt faced 169 pitchers with a minimum of 20 PA, and struck out to every single one of them except for five: Mike Caldwell (23 PA), Steve Trout (38 PA), Greg Mathews (25 PA), Zane Smith (26 PA) and Tim Leary (26 PA). Pretty wild, eh? 

Want to see something even wilder? Of those 169 pitchers, every one of them walked Schmidt at least once, except for Dennis Eckersley (35 PA), Gary Nolan (22 PA) and Tim Leary (26 PA). Talk about intimidation. 

Add on top of that the fact that Mike Schmidt hit a home run against 141 of those 169 pitchers (83.4%!), with both Jerry Reuss and Bob Forsch lit up for 11 taters each. Insane! 

But with the yin, comes the yang. Almost half of the 169 pitchers struck Schmidt out at least 20% of the time. Steve Rogers, Bill Bonham and Tom Seaver all struck out the Mighty Jack at least 30 times. 

Last what we’ll parse is OPS, the true measure of who did and did not get pwn3d by Mike Schmidt. Fred Norman tops the list with the highest OPS against Schmidt at 1.655. Mike DESTROYED Norman almost every time at the plate. Half of Schmidt’s hits against Norman were home runs (6 HRs out of 12 H). In fact, 83.3% of Schmidt’s hits against Norman were for extra bases. 

Way down at the other end, Tim Leary had the best OPS against Schmidt, but he doesn’t win the prize. Scott Garrelts gets those honors with his absolute domination of Schmidt. Schmidt batted a lowly .050 against Garrelts and struck out 45.5% of the time for an anemic OPS of .336. 

Schmidt Pwn3d You!	You Pwn3d Schmidt!
1.655 OPS	.336 OPS