BABIP: Skill vs. Luck - Hitters

July 2, 2009 3:36pm CDT

Acronyms are everywhere. TiVo, CIA, MLB, these and many more are part of the lexicon of the life that we lead on a daily basis. Baseball, therefore, is not immune to this phenomena, and in fact it might be one of the worst offenders in the entire universe: OPS, HR/F, LOB, PECTOA... the list goes on and on (if you are looking to make some sense of all of it, you might take a few moments to look at a piece we did earlier in the year titled Sabermetric Primer: Scoring Concepts where we give the explanation of many of the fewer known measures used to analyze players in the baseball universe).

As for this piece, we will be discussing Batting Average on Balls in Play, or BABIP, each week of the season. We will alternate between hitters and pitchers as we attempt to ferret out which players are over- or under-performing based on their established baselines.

WHAT IS BABIP

BABIP, also referred to as a player's hit rate, is the rate at which batted balls end up as base hits (a novel approach given what the acronym stands for, don't you think?). There is one caveat with BABIP; it removes home runs from the equation, because technically the ball isn't in play on a home run. Here is the simple formula in play for the measure:

(H-HR)/(AB-K-HR+SF)

The major league average is in the .290-.300 range.

Note: The above description is taken almost directly from an earlier piece called What is BABIP?. Make sure to give that piece a thorough read so that you can familiarize yourself with how the measure should be understood.

For a further primer on the idea of Expected BABIP, give the following link to BABIP: Skill vs. Luck Hitters a look.

HITTERS

The Laughably Awful

.203 - Jay Bruce The worst mark of any regular player belongs to this future star. For a guy who produced a mark around .350 in his minor league career, the depths that he has fallen to this season are shocking. You can't lay everything on bad luck, after all his line-drive his flat out atrocious at 13.4 percent. But still, a man with this much talent simply cannot continue to struggle this massively. Hell, his eBABIP would still be somewhere around .250 with a bit of luck this season, so there is a lot of room for growth here.

.213 - Jimmy Rollins One of these days you are going to pity the pitchers that Rollins takes his frustration out on. His BABIP is about .065 points off what his eBABIP says it should be, even with what would be a career worst in his LD-rate at 16 percent. Rollins has never finished with a rate below 19 percent in this measure, so when he starts squaring the ball up a bit more consistently the results should finally start to show themselves.

.238 - Garrett Atkins Atkins is up to .224 in the batting average category thanks to a return to prominence in June as he hit .327 in 55 at-bats. Hey, you have to start somewhere right? After four-straight seasons with a LD-rate of 22 percent, his current 16.6 percent mark is clearly a "mistake," especially since his BB/K mark is solid at 0.75 which shows him to be handling the strike zone like he has in the past. Barring an injury, he should continue his move up the BABIP list.

.241 - Dan Uggla One of the best three-year power runs ever by a second baseman appears likely to stretch out to four years as Uggla has 15 home runs and 45 RBI over half the season. However, his spotty batting average has tumbled to .225 this season despite the fact that his walk rate is higher than ever before while his strikeout rate is below his career average. Uggla is also sporting a 15.8 percent LD-rate which would be a three-year high, yet his BABIP mark is more than .050 points below his career rate. Something has to give moving forward so look for him to be a bit "lucky" the rest of the way.

Still Working on a Comeback

.264 - Vernon Wells Not much has gone right for this all-around ballplayer who is operating with a career-worst six percent HR/F rate (career 12 percent) and the worst BABIP mark of his career and well below his career .293 mark. Not surprisingly his LD-rate is below 16 percent for the first time at 15.6 percent as he owns a career 19 percent mark. If not for a .265 BABIP mark in 2007 I'd completely write this off, but given his struggles in most aspect of his game, Wells has a lot of work to do if he hopes to return to his career levels.

.267 - Lance Berkman How is this for in-season growth?

April: .162/.326/.392
May: .286/.391/.527
June: .318/.436/.625

Yeah, Berkman is starting to make up for lost time. Despite the growth, he still has a career worst 17.3 percent LD-rate (career 20 percent), and his BABIP has never been below .303 in a full season in his career. Are you going to bet against the Big Puma continuing his ascent back to a more standard level of production over the course of the second half?

.271 - Curtis Granderson The man is on pace to obliterate his career-high in home runs of 23, he already has gone deep 18 times, but his batting average is down .022 points. However, his G/F ratio has hit the dumps at 0.59, an almost 50 percent reduction from his 0.99 mark last season. As a result of a nearly 51 percent fly ball rate, it's not a shock that Granderson has seen his average dip while his power has increased. Still, for a man who owns a .329 BABIP mark, his current rate of producing hits seems a bit to low to continue moving forward.

.274 - Mark Teixeira Just take a look at his BABIP marks the past few years, and you get a sense that his current level of production is low: .290, .295, .317, .308, .344 and .321. Teixeira also has posted a LD-rate of at least 19.8 percent in each of his seasons, so his current 16 percent mark clearly is an outlier. We could break it all down, but those two sentences pretty much say it all don't they?

Heading for a Fall?

.456 - David Wright We have already touched on how utterly amazing the run Wright has been this season in previous BABIP articles, so much so that his current BABIP is simply astronomical. Wright, who owns a career .351 mark which is already fantastic, has only seen a 1.6 percent increase in his line drive rate up to 25 percent this season (career 23.4 percent). So how is it that his BABIP mark has shot up over .100 points? Luck is the only explanation. Moreover, his BB/K rate has fallen from 0.81 the past two seasons all the way down to 0.54 this season, another reason to think he has been exceedingly lucky. Best guess? The average drops much closer to .300 as the season wears on while the power numbers increase.

.369 - Aaron Rowand The Giants center fielder has been on fire ever since he was inserted into the leadoff role as he has hit .340 over 150 at-bats. Rowand owns a career .284 batting average so one has to be a bit weary of his current .299 mark, especially since he has hit under .272 in three of the past four seasons. Add in the fact that the man owns a career .328 BABIP mark and you can see the concern, especially since he is currently striking out at the highest rate of his career (24.3 percent). Rowand also has the same LD-rate of 19 percent that he has produced the past two seasons, so there is no legitimate way to expect his current BABIP to continue.

.363 - Felipe Lopez
Career .319 BABIP guys could produce a number this high over the course of a season, but it doesn't happen that frequently. Lopez is operating at a career best in the line drive category with a 23 percent mark, but that's substantially up for a man who has never produced a mark above 20.2 percent in his career. After all, how many .265 hitters bat .304? Yep, common sense should rule the day here.

.363 - Carl Crawford, Michael Bourn
These two speed burners have the same BABIP mark, so I thought I would hit them both.

Crawford owns a .333 mark in his career and has never been below .301 in a season in his career. Heck, he even had a .375 mark in 2007. However, Crawford is slightly undershooting his career LD-rate of 20 percent at 19.5 percent, which would lead to an expected BABIP of about .315, not the over .360 mark he is currently riding.

Bourn has been a revelation to those that took him late on a flier. We don't have a lot of data to go on here, but early returns are that Bourn has "earned" this mark with his 24.5 percent line drive rate. Alas, it is dubious that a man with a career 19.5 percent rate will produce such a superlative mark over the course of a season. Speed is certainly helpful, but this is still a pretty strong mark to expect anyone to hold on to over the course of a season without a track record of doing so.