Two of baseball's most notorious free swingers said this spring they'd changed their approach at the plate to take more walks and see more pitches. Last year Carlos Gomez swung at the first pitch 40.6 percent of the time (according to the Bill James Handbook) which was 6th most in the AL and took few walks. Jeff Francoeur swung at the first pitch 42.9 percent of the time - the most in the NL.
It's only a week into the season, so the sample size is small, but so far they look like the same old hackers:
| Year | BB/K | OBA | F-Strike|STAR| |
| 2009 | 1/9 | .133 | 70|PERCENT| |
| 2008 | 25/142 | .296 | 65.8|PERCENT| |
| Year | BB/K | OBA | F-Strike|STAR| |
| 2009 | 1/4 | .303 | 54.6|PERCENT| |
| 2008 | 39/111 | .294 | 65.2|PERCENT| |
Francoeur appears to have some very mild improvement with just four strikeouts, but the duo has two walks between them. It looks like we're going to have to chalk up "new approach at the plate" to such spring mirages as "best shape of his life" and "I'm going to steal 100 bases."
|STAR|F-Strike|PERCENT| (first pitch strike percentage) comes from our friends at Fangraphs. It's the percentage of plate appearances (for batters) or batters faced (for pitchers) that the first pitch was a strike. This includes anytime that the count after the first pitch was 0-1, or anytime the ball was put into play on the first pitch of a plate appearance. So while not the same as the first pitch swing, it's a close enough approximation to show these two are not exactly living up to their spring training approaches.