Hey everyone, how's it going? A lot of good baseball this week, especially that 22-inning Rockies-Padres marathon. I wish i would have stayed up for that but I stopped after the Mets and Nationals went 15 innings the same night. It's also been a lot of fun to watch the second-year players.
I've noticed that the second-year players that had below-average years last year (Alex Gordon, Justin Upton, Daisuke Matsuzaka, Lastings Milledge, Tim Lincecum, Carlos Gomez, Adam Wainwright, Franklin Guiterrez, Matt Cain, Mark Reynolds), are off to great starts this year. But star rookies (Jacoby Ellsbury, Troy Tulowitzski, Ryan Braun, Hunter Pence, Phil Hughes, and others) are slumping, some mightily. It's give and take, for second-year players, usually it's that third year you see the true player. So who's for real? That's a story for another day.
So for the basis of this article, most of you are probably wondering what the hell I am talking about. Well, for years, many sabermatricians have argued the viability of many statistics in general because of how luck factors into them. There is one statistic that is arguably considered the best way to measure luck: BABIP.
David Ortiz has a .063 BABIP, is that the reason for his bad start?
"Better lucky then good?" Is it that simple?
BABIP is short for Batting Average on Balls in Play and was developed by statistician Voros McCracken.
The issue is, in 2001, McCracken wrote a very controversial article describing how pitchers have no control over balls in play. Here's a quote from that article:
The critical thing to understand is that major-league pitchers don't appear to have the ability to prevent hits on balls in play. There are many possible reasons why this is the case, and I don't really have a concrete idea as to why it is.
But the one thing I do know is that it is the case.
Many articles have spurred from that statement; most against this assertion. I mean, don't pitchers have some degree of control?
Well let's start with what exactly defines BABIP. It is (courtesy of Wikipedia):
According to Wikipedia:
BABIP is commonly used as a red flag in sabermetric analysis, as a consistently high or low BABIP is hard to maintain - much more so for pitchers than hitters. Therefore, BABIP can be used to spot fluky seasons by pitchers, as those whose BABIPs are extremely high can often be expected to improve in the following season, and those pitchers whose BABIPs are extremely low can often be expected to regress in the following season.
An average BABIP is approximately .290, with it being higher for a good hitter and lower for a new pitcher.
It was clear that whoever submitted this definition, took it from McCracken's point of view.
McCracken argues that BABIP has been a good indicator about how a pitcher might perform in the future. Not because it identifies effectiveness, but because it identifies how lucky or unlucky a pitcher was over that particular season.
Sabermatricians have been in an uproar. Tom Tippett wrote in an article for Diamond Mind Baseball his thoughts against the idea. Tippett summarizes McCracken's argument in a few points:
- there are "massive differences in the ability of pitchers" even before considering balls in play. To put it another way, a lot of a pitcher's ERA is explained by his walk rate, strikeout rate, and ability to prevent homers.
- the correlation between a pitcher's IPAvg one year and the next is low, suggesting that pitching ability might not have a major impact on IPAvg, as compared to other factors such as defense and luck
- some of the best pitchers in the game, such as Greg Maddux and Pedro Martinez, have gone from the top to the bottom and back to the top in IPAvg in subsequent seasons, again suggesting that these results are largely out of their control
- the variations in IPAvg decrease when you add park effects and the quality of the defense to the analysis
- projections of next-year pitching stats are more accurate if you use a team's collective IPAvg than if you use each pitcher's personal IPAvg from the year before
For my purposes here, when you click that article, skip all the way down to the bar charts because that's pretty much the whole basis of the article. Tippett's argument is that the success can be tied to BABIP with respect to the length of the pitcher's career and the era they pitched in (with respect to the type of pitcher they are). Here's a quote from the article:
We've seen that there's more than one way to succeed as a big-league pitcher. Robin Roberts walked 772 fewer batters than his peers. Roger Clemens struck out 1355 more batters than average. Greg Maddux yielded 147 fewer homeruns. And Charlie Hough prevented somewhere between 299 and 371 hits on balls in play.
The bottom line, though, is that I am convinced that pitchers do influence in-play outcomes to a significant degree. There's a reason why Charlie Hough and Jamie Moyer and Phil Niekro and Tom Glavine and Bud Black have had successful careers despite mediocre strikeout rates. There's a reason why the top strikeout pitchers have also suppressed in-play hits at a good rate. Using power or control or deception or a knuckleball, pitchers can keep hitters off balance and induce more than their share of routine grounders, popups, and lazy fly balls.
How do I see it? Well I believe it's a degree of both.
It's luck in the fact that line-drives (more importantly the ones that result in outs) are generally not recorded statistically. This "hitting them where they ain't" addage, has been used to explain David Ortiz, Miguel Cabrera, Gary Sheffield, and Jason Giambi's slow start this season (as explained in Sarah Green’s article for the Metro Boston News )
But there is a degree of skill in causing more pop-ups and grounders as a result of keeping a player off-balance.
I believe look for consistency in BABIP to see how effective a pitcher is over about a five to seven year period. Therein lies another question: Do we include minor league statistics? I don't think so, there's a big mental part of the game and being in the majors is a big part of it.
In short, BABIP is good to analyze a veteran pitcher. Good for getting bargain, rather lesser-hyped, players off the waiver wire in your fantasy league.
This is an issue that is a sabermetrical work in progress. But it's a good start.
Flashing the Trivia: Jamie Moyer
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4 comments:
Anthony --
I'm kind of glad you brought this up, though I think you neglected to mention some really important points here.
A few abbreviations I'm going to use here:
BABIP - batting average on balls in play
LD% - percent of batted balls as line drives
GB% - percent of batted balls as grounders
Batters have some control of their BABIP because line drives are more likely to go for hits than grounders or fly balls. Simply put, balls that are hit hard are more likely to go for hits than balls that are not hit hard. Faster runners are also much more likely to get infield hits than slower ones.
A pitcher can control his BABIP only if he induces a lot of infield fly balls (pop outs) or grounders, which is why extreme ground ball pitchers (like Chien-Ming Wang and Brandon Webb) and some closers (like Joe Nathan) might have lower BABIP than you would otherwise expect.
Pitcher BABIP is somewhat dependent on his team's ballpark. Grounders are more likely to get through on artificial turf. Fly balls are more likely to drop for hits in large ballparks (interestingly "Pitcher's Parks" are likely to have higher BABIP because a large outfield means more hits will drop in play).
The defense behind a pitcher (and his own ability to field his position to a certain extent) also plays a role. Grounders up the middle that get past Derek Jeter might not get past Jack Wilson.
In Ortiz's case, he is partially the victim of hard luck and partially at fault himself. Obviously, a .063 BABIP is an anomaly (though according to the Hardball Times it is actually a .172).
His LD% is down to 10.0 and his GB% is up to 45.0. Do not forget, as well, that teams overshift their infielders against Ortiz so balls that might normally trickle through the hole between first and second become outs. Finally, Ortiz is not exactly the kind of player who is good at legging out infield hits, so an inflated GB% is not exactly going to help him there, either.
As far as Ortiz is concerned, I would not be too worried about him, because:
A. we are talking about a pretty small sample size; and
B. he is the kind of player (read: he is fat) who is likely to be most affected by the jet-lag some analysts ascribed Boston's slow start to.
That said, although statistics may be one of the three kinds of lies, the decline in Ortiz's normally very high BABIP can be ascribed to his increase in grounders and decrease in line drives and not just bad luck.
Jesse,
I actually did mention the line drives
"It's luck in the fact that line-drives (more importantly the ones that result in outs) are generally not recorded statistically."
I meant that in respect to the fluctuation of BABIP, where indeed hitters do have a degree of control.
I also mentioned:
"But there is a degree in causing more pop-ups and grounders as a result of keeping a player off-balance." in respects to pitching.
I didn't mention the park because that is out of the control of the pitcher/hitter. Same with the defense (albeit if the pitcher himself makes an error) it's out of the pitcher/hitter's control. Which is why BABIP can fluctuate so greatly from year to year.
But as the years go on, BABIP usually does level itself out.
Those connected articles that I posted do have their flaws, but they do present both sides of the argument.
I still believe that BABIP can aid the assessment of a veteran pitcher or hitter. Of course it shouldn't weigh very high, but it should still be considered. BABIP still remains as both a degree of luck and a degree of skill, with neither weighing more than the other.
Anthony --
I agree with you that there is a certain degree of skill involved, but I am pretty sure that luck is really the main determining factor of a pitcher's BABIP (or h%) for the vast majority of pitchers.
The pitchers that Tom Tippett used as examples of pitchers who limited BABIP were either All-Time greats or knuckleballers.
He also used a ridiculously misleading statistic when he showed that pitchers who lasted longer have lower h%.
Although career length (roughly translated as pitching skill) and h% may be inversely correlated, that does not imply that career length is the cause for the lower h%. It is just as possible that h% is a product of luck (be it good or bad) and the length of a pitcher's career corresponds to his h%. I do not recall Tippett addressing this possibility.
In the Hardball Times article I referenced before, Dave Studeman notes,
"In fact, the evidence I've seen would indicate that, once a major league pitcher reaches the major leagues, his line drive-stopping capability is pretty much the same as every other pitcher's."
Because BABIP is so closely related to LD%, hitters have a great deal of control, whereas pitchers have much less. My point in referencing home parks and defenses is that they will generally play a greater role than the pitcher does himself (except in extreme circumstances) in limiting his h%.
Hey, I didn't read everything so pardon me if this was mentioned in one of the articles but something like subtle changes in defensive positioning can influence BABIP can it not? Thus reinforcing the notion that a pitcher can't control the outcomes for balls put in play...
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