If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a millions times: Alfonso Soriano will get himself out swinging at pitches low and away.

Thing is, when Soriano is hot, he can do something with that pitch. So it might be really hard to get him to stop swinging there. Let’s all get used to it, and take a look at how well (or not well) Sori does with the tempting fruit found at his knees across the plate.

For the purposes of this post, I’m defining “low and away” as anything below the middle of Soriano’s strike zone and about one ball’s width out across the plate or more. You can slice and dice the zone, create nice heat maps, so this is just one way of looking at this questions.

Since I’m selecting a small region of the hitting area, I decided to group the data by month. Sure, kind of arbitrary, but let’s roll with it.

Starting with April of 2009, Soriano saw 52, 72, 69 and 45 pitches per month that met my definition of low and away. Small sample sizes, but, again, so be it.

My basic premise is Soriano hit well in April and in July. May and June were horrible. I think his monthly slash lines (avg/oba/slg) show that pretty well:

April: 284/364/591
May: 216/261/396
June: 198/274/311
July: 345/409/583

First question: Did Soriano swing at more low and away pitches in the “bad” months?

Answer: No. Soriano’s swing rate on low and away pitches has gone from .500 in April and .422 in July. April was his highest swing rate, July his lowest. May and June were steps down in between (.486 and .435).

Second question: Did Soriano whiff more often during the “bad” months?

Answer: Not really. Sure, his worst month, whiff-wise, on low and away pitches was June, but the sequence from April onward went .269, .143, .367, .211. Overall, if you lump the middle months and the outter months into two sets of data, he’s a little better in the good months. Still a no.

Third question: Did Soriano hit the ball any better in the “good” months?

Answer: Yes, his hot hitting included his supposedly vulnerable zone. This one deserves a table:

SLGCON is just slugging percentage on fair balls (including home runs). Notice the bad months have low line drive rates, above 0 pop-up rates and inflated ground-ball rates.

To sum it all up:

1. Soriano has gradually started laying off some low and away pitches
2. His contact rate has too much variability to tell us much about his performance “down there”
3. Besides the sudden arrival of extra base hits, Soriano’s hot months show he can hit line drives, and avoid pop-ups, on the low and away pitches.

All this tells me is what Derrek Lee already told the press. It doesn’t matter where you bat Soriano, and it isn’t about him having the wrong approach. He just lost his swing and it took two months to find it. I just hope it sticks around a while.