Yesterday, James Fegan wrote an important story at Sox Machine about how Chase Meidroth turned some of the affected person gamers in baseball. The White Sox need Meidroth to be extra aggressive, however after a current call-up, he’s working a minuscule 17.3% chase charge. He ran that very same chase charge final season in Triple-A, and it ranked fifth lowest among the many 381 gamers who noticed at the least 500 pitches exterior the zone. Right here at FanGraphs, Michael Baumann additionally lined Meidroth’s overabundance of persistence a pair weeks in the past. Unsurprisingly, Baumann’s article featured one thing Fegan’s didn’t: a paragraph about nominative determinism. The defining attribute of Meidroth’s profile is that he’s a Chase who doesn’t chase. However Meidroth isn’t the one Chase in baseball. Possibly he’s an outlier. Possibly the opposite gamers named Chase rack up chases, if solely out of a honest want to obey the fifth commandment.
Chase Utley was the primary main league Chase. He debuted in 2003, conveniently only a yr after Sports activities Information Options began monitoring pitches. That signifies that we are able to monitor the chase charge of each Chase who’s ever performed. I went by means of his year-by-year chase charges with the intention to calculate a league-adjusted determine, which we’ll name Chase Fee Plus for the rest of this text. Utley’s Chase Fee Plus was 88, 12% under the league common, and it helped him run a stroll charge that was 6% above the league common. In different phrases, the primary Chase in historical past didn’t chase a lot both. What about the remainder of the bunch?
That is extraordinarily disappointing. Of our 4 Chases, the one one who has ever lived as much as his identify is Chase d’Arnaud. Chase Headley chased virtually precisely as a lot as Utley and walked considerably extra usually. Meidroth’s persistence is the rationale we’re right here within the first place. He’s decided to find how far you may make it within the majors with out ever taking your bat off your shoulder. Fortunately, d’Arnaud actually did his half. Not solely is he probably the most chase-happy Chase of all time, he’s additionally probably the most chase-happy d’Arnaud of all time. His 35.9% profession chase charge trounces his brother Travis d’Arnaud’s 27.8% mark. Certain, all of the strikeouts and lack of walks that resulted from all these chases seemingly contributed to Chase’s profession being a lot shorter than his brother’s, however the sibling bragging rights are far more vital. In honor of Chase d’Arnaud’s accomplishments, right here’s a spotlight reel that includes a few of his biggest chases.
We are able to additionally take some consolation in Hal Chase, the primary baseman who performed from 1905 to 1919. Over the course of his profession, his stroll charge was 52% under the league common. He will need to have actually been chasing. We additionally know that he was chasing paper, as Martin Kohout’s SABR bio of Chase calls him “probably the most notoriously corrupt participant in baseball historical past.” So possibly he’s not the Chase we should always holding up for example, however however, he wasn’t a one-trick pony when it got here to nominative determinism. His center identify was Homer, and his 57 profession dwelling runs did give him an above-average slugging proportion and remoted slugging proportion for the period.
So the batters allow us to down in a giant method. Only a complete bunch of disappointments with wonderful plate self-discipline that helped them be good hitters or no matter. The excellent news is that there are way more pitchers named Chase than batters. Let’s put our religion in them. To date, we’ve seen 9 pitchers named Chase, three of whom made their debuts this season identical to Meidroth. We’ve additionally seen two pitchers named Chasen, and also you higher consider we’re going to incorporate the gerunds in our pattern. How have our 11 Chase(n)s fared?
Chase(n)s Who Don’t Earn Chases
The pitchers aren’t racking up chases both! Our whole pattern of 9 Chases and two Chasens has a mixed Chase Fee Plus of 98. They’re just under common at incomes chases, and that quantity is definitely inflated, as a result of our ringers, Chasen Shreve and Chasen Bradford, are propping it up with the third- and fourth-highest marks of the group. Even our place participant hero Chase d’Arnaud didn’t earn a single chase when he threw a rubbish time inning in 2018.
Look, I knew coming in that there was no explicit motive to consider that ballplayers named Chase would both chase extra or earn extra chases. However I can’t fake I’m not upset. Grammatically talking, it’s affordable to learn the identify as an exhortation, and to date, many of the Chases we’ve seen on the massive league stage are usually not obeying it. They’re not chasing. They’re not incomes chases. They’re simply placing much less chase into the world and it’s unhappy to see. However I’ve hope for the longer term, and it rests primarily on data I gleaned from janky, auto-generated web sites.
For those who’ve by no means met anybody named Chase rising up, however you now really feel just like the identify has rapidly taken over the baseball world, you’re not alone. Chase is a comparatively younger identify, and it actually did come out of nowhere. The Social Safety Administration web site doesn’t present any file of it till 1972, as a result of it wasn’t among the many prime 1,000 hottest names for boys till that time. However by 1983, it was within the prime 200, and it has remained there ever since. It peaked at 61 in 2009, when 0.348% of boys had been named Chase. The graph under comes courtesy of NameTrends.web.
It’s not simply that the identify has grow to be extra fashionable in recent times. It’s additionally about the place all these Chases are coming from. In line with an internet site referred to as MyNameStats.com, Texas is the state with probably the most Chases, and the identify is mostly far more fashionable within the South. For those who’re from the Northeast or Midwest, you’ve in all probability by no means met a Chase. They’re not out of your neck of the woods. They reside the place all of the baseball gamers come from. (The identify can also be wildly fashionable in Utah, the place child names are barely completely different than wherever else within the nation.)
There have solely been 13 main league gamers named Chase. All of them debuted this century, and a fast Baseball Reference search led me to fifteen extra within the minors proper now. It could really feel just like the identify has taken over baseball proper now, however simply wait a pair years. Eric Longenhagen’s most up-to-date High 100 Prospects replace featured 4 Chases, highlighted by Colorado’s Chase Dollander, who made his debut a month in the past. The Chase explosion is just starting. We’ll have many extra possibilities to discover a Chase who takes the identify significantly.