There is no such thing as an even count

During the May 24th game against the Twins, Ryan Lefebvre told a story about how former Royals VP Mike Swanson always used to say that 2-2 is not an even count and should not be considered as such. Even though the two numbers are the same, the distance from a walk and from a strikeout is not the same. Honestly I had never thought about it before, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought Swanson had a point. When you actually take a second to think about, it’s kind of obvious, yea? A 2-2 count means two strikes, but we count it as “even count”.

Is a 2-2 count more of an “even count” or a “two strike count”? This is easy to look up on Baseball Reference. Using 2025 data, batters as…