Here's the sitch: leadoff hitter up in the first inning. Eight percent of first pitch balls in play go for hits.

So, what does this tell us? Craig Burley - a great thinker and great guy to walk through Toronto with - took a hard look at the situation and many more, coming back to that first pitch strike.

The problem is what a professor called "binary thinking" back in a course at A&M. No matter that the course was a religion course, it holds for many things. Black. White. On. Off. Strike. Ball. Democrat. Republican. Simplifying things works to deconstruct and simplify matters, but if we're not careful, we'll miss important details that lie in the gray area.

In this case, we're missing important information. "Strike one" doesn't tell us much. In some cases, I'll bet that some of the pitches were NOT strikes, just merely hit into play because a hitter liked what he saw. There's also some bias implicit in that impatient hitters are likely to hit worse than those that don't. Is this first pitch good? Is it nasty? Is it a fastball or curve? Up or down? What's the hitter like? How many take the first pitch, further skewing the data?

Tracing the path of Craig's thinking from this article and it's mate, through Carlos Gomez and Dave Duncan's pitch analysis, we're missing more information than we have. It doesn't take much analysis to know that strike one is an important pitch, that avoiding walks and staying ahead in the count will help any pitcher. Craig's made a good start here, but his next step - discerning HOW to pitch that first strike - is the one I'll want to read.