Thursday: BABIP Revisited

To follow up on yesterday's post about BABIP for pitchers I thought we could examine the statistic through an offensive lens. It works slightly differently for hitters: the league average of .300 is not always helpful when examining a hitter's BABIP. For instance, Ichiro has a career BABIP of .356. Instead of being the result of a terrible amount of luck over his entire career, this is due to the fact that he is a terrific hitter. On the other hand, it has been shown that (up to a certain point) pitchers have little to no control over their BABIP. In other words, hitters have much more control over their BABIP than pitchers do. Nevertheless, extraordinarily high or low BABIPs can still be used to predict future performance.

Most of the BABIPs for Rangers hitters from 2008 were as expected, but the following cases were somewhat surprising:

Milton Bradley: 2008 BABIP: .396 Career BABIP: .326

First of all, I expect a hitter of the Milton Bradley variety to have a high BABIP to begin with: he works the count to wait for the right pitch (4.00 PPA in 2008), swings and misses a lot (25.7% of the times he swung in 2008), and he mashes the ball when he does connect (.563 SLG in 2008). It certainly helped that he stung more line drives (24.7% LDs, more than the previous 4 seasons). But it doesn't matter who is being considered: George Brett, Tony Gwynn, Ted Williams, Ichiro Suzuki; a .396 BABIP is incredible (and most likely unsustainable). Especially when considering that Milton's 2008 mark was 70 points higher than his career BABIP. I concur with Bill James, who predicts that Bradley's 2009 BABIP will regress to a .341 mark (much closer to his career total). This means, of course, that Bradley probably won't hit .321 again. Fortunately for the Cubs, however, that still isn't too shabby.

Ramon Vazquez: 2008 BABIP: .355 Career BABIP: .315

To Vazquez's credit, he did hit more line drives in 2008 than ever before in his career (27.3% LDs) and significantly fewer fly balls (26.4% FBs compared to 35.6% in 2007). His luck started to catch up with him at the end of the season, however, as he hit .208/.317/.226 in August and .133/.235/.200 in September. Look for his BABIP to regress to .315 and for his batting average to return to his career average of .257.

Other players with notable BABIPs, but not enough career data to be significant:

Chris Davis: 2008 BABIP .353
Jarrod Saltalamacchia: 2008 BABIP .388
Taylor Teagarden: 2008 BABIP .409
Jason Botts: 2008 BABIP .222