BABIP

I was bored this evening so while I was baking something in the oven, I thought that I would start looking at some advanced statistics in baseball.

BABIP stands for batting average on balls in play. It simply means the % of balls put into play that are hits, it takes strike outs and home runs out of the equation. The equation is as follows:

I stole that graphic from wikipedia, but it had the best image of that I could find. You take out the home runs from both sides, because home runs are not technically in play, and strike outs don't put the ball in play. Sacrifice flies are added back in because they are put into play, they just happen to be beneficial to the offensive team.

BABIP can be used for many different things. It is one of the only stats that gets used for bother hitters and pitchers. It can be used to show how good the defense is. What I have seen it used most common for is how lucky/unlucky a hitter or pitcher is. If a hitter is having a consistently low BABIP he is most likely having some sort of issue at the plate. If you look at the player with the lowest BABIP of all the qualifying hitters in baseball, Dan Uggla, I think there is something more wrong than just bad luck. From what I have read and heard he is not getting his front foot down fast enough, but it would probably indicate that something is out of whack with him batting approach.

Judging BABIP is largely subjective. Different players tend to have different levels for BABIP, it does not mean that they are better than others if their BABIP is higher. Faster players tend to have a higher BABIP than slower players, because they are able to beat out more infield hits than slower players would. Austin Jackson lead the league in BABIP last year. That is helped because he strikes out a lot, which means he puts the ball in play less, and he is a fast runner. Ichiro regularly has one of the highest BABIP's in the league, because he gets lots of infield hits as well as being a generally good slap hitter.

Pitchers who strike out a lot of batters can also have higher BABIP's than other types of pitchers, but ground ball pitchers can also get crushed in this statistic, if he plays with a defense that is only decent and not elite. I would venture to guess that groundball pitchers have higher BABIP's than flyball pitchers. That would be my guess.

The stat can be used to show how lucky a player is. Players tend to consistently hover around the same number for BABIP from season to season. If a hitter has an irregularly high BABIP, when compared to his career average, it means that he is most likely due to regress back to the norm. The same thing can be said for a player that is suffering through an unusually low BABIP, unless that player is suffering through an injury, or some other sort of problem like Dan Uggla, mentioned above. One indication earlier in the year that Joe Mauer was hurt, was the fact that he has an unusually low BABIP compared to his averages, of course this was in a small sample size too.

BABIP for pitchers works in in an inversed way. If the pitcher has an extremely low BABIP it means that he is most likely going to be due for some regression. If he has a really high BABIP then that will likely return to the norm as well.

My favorite source for BABIP numbers is fangraphs.com, I usually use baseballreference.com for just about all of my statistics, but this is the one that I use fangraphs for.

Well I just wanted to do a little bit of sports writing tonight. I hope this has been enjoyable, as well as educational.

New Blog

Well I have a new, new blog. My other blog will be just for stuff in my life, and this one will be for my musings on sports. Sometimes they will be short entries, other times I am sure they will be long and extended, depending on me mood. This is part of an effort to just expand the amount of writing that I do. I think more writing will make me happier.

Just something I was thinking about earlier, has any player capitalized more on free agency than Adrian Beltre? Beltre is a good player, but is he elite? He has had 2 different career years, in contract years. Paul Depodesta partially lost his job as the Dodgers GM, at least according to what I have read, because he elected to let Beltre go into free agency rather than sign him to a high priced long term deal.

Beltre in 2004 with the Dodgers made $5,000,000 and had a WAR of 10.1 which was second in the league. Which he was able to parley into a 5 year $64 million contract with the mariners and over the course of 5 years there he had a total of 13.8 WAR, or 2.76 WAR/year. These numbers are from the WAR stat on Baseballreference.com not Fangraghs.com.

Of course during the writing of this I read and article on Fangraphs.com that was completely denouncing what I am writing here. I don't agree that because he had a bad final year with Seattle, that it disproves my theory here, its hard to have a career year when you only play in 111 games, and I guess he missed those games after getting nailed in the junk and he has chosen not to wear a cup. He went on the DL with bleeding testicles. So very uncool. I don't blame him for struggling the rest of the season after having some broken balls. I guess I didn't imagine my first sports blog post would talk about Adrian Beltre's testicles. Oh well, so it goes.

I am not arguing that he is not a good player. He is, but he is a 1 time all star, and that was just last year, during which he was playing for a new contract. I am saying that of all of the players that I can recall, he is the only one who has turned contract years into big contracts twice. Potentially making more than he was worth both times. I think Mariners fans would probably agree on that. Please let me know if you can think of someone else who I have forgotten

I think in later posts I will do some discussion of Sabermetrics, to help explain some of the stats to those who do not spend as much time reading about baseball as I do. I would also take suggestions of things people would like my take on.