He's a dangerous hitter with good bat speed, but he has to change/shorten his load phase or pitchers are going to discover they can blow him away with 89MPH fastballs.

and while he may have had some trouble with the change up, he was much closer to league average there than he is against a fastball, which is obviously the most thrown pitch in baseball.

League Averages

+-----------+-------+---------+-------+-----------+---------+

| PitchType | Ball% | Called% | Foul% | Swinging% | InPlay% |

+-----------+-------+---------+-------+-----------+---------+

| FB        |  0.36 |    0.19 |  0.19 |      0.06 |    0.19 |

| SL        |  0.36 |    0.14 |  0.17 |      0.13 |    0.20 |

| Curve     |  0.40 |    0.19 |  0.13 |      0.11 |    0.16 |

| Change    |  0.40 |    0.11 |  0.14 |      0.13 |    0.21 |

+-----------+-------+---------+-------+-----------+---------+

| All       |  0.37 |    0.17 |  0.17 |      0.09 |    0.19 |

+-----------+-------+---------+-------+-----------+---------+

InPlay - includes home runs

Contact% is exactly what it sounds like. The players contact rate [(hits+fouls+in play outs)/(hits+fouls+strikesSwinging+in play outs)] on pitches swung at... It's a subset of the other measures..

Fields watched 62.5% of curveballs and 50% of sliders.

Preliminarily, against fastballs, he WHIFFed at 9% of them, made contact 77+% of the time he swung, and hit most of his HR. Yet he only had a .199 BABIP on fastballs.

I suppose this is because when he got one he liked, he knew what to do with it, hitting HRs. You would think that he would still have a higher BABIP on fastballs given his ability to smoke them over the outfield wall.

I haven't touched any of the pitch f/x data, I'm just using the provided tools to break down how some of our players have performed vs. league average.

Joh Walsh's opening salvo about the Sinker it's also a good primer as he checks out what the terminology means first
Josh Kalk examines an average pitcher
Dan Fox did some stuff on what it means to have a good eye
this might be the best one.  a look at an average fastball, curve, slider and change  that's where Cheat is getting these expected averages from
Walsh's pitch identification tutorial
Not  pitch f/x, but still sweet: expected BABIP and such based on GB/LD/FB from Dan Fox's blog
Also not pitch f/x, but it is THT
...this examines reliever usage and whether over-use is responsible for some of the wild fluctuations we see in reliever performance

And here are all of Fields swing-and-misses as captured by pitch f/x...

(Fields BABIP was .293 last season)

The NL West must not have had a whole lot of pitch f/x enabled parks, because we've only got 1/2 of Reynolds pitches seen captured. In that time, he did strike out on more fastballs than Fields and had a worse contact rate. But he was also much worse on breaking balls (as you would expect from a high-strikeout guy). He WHIFFed at 25+% of sliders thrown, for example.

Gomes is a guy to whom I've often compared Fields in the past. We have even less data on him than we do Reynolds (about 1/3rd of his ABs). He's your standard high-strikeout guy who can't hit breaking stuff. The thing that I noticed is that he seemed to have more pitches called for strikes against him.

Cust I kinda covered last night. I'll put together a spreadsheet of high-strikeout guys by the end of the weekend... At which point, I think we'll have come to the conclusion that Fields is a unique ballplayer. Whether those unique tools will play at the major league level will be up for discussion.