Monday: BB% and K%

Today we examine those who walked and struck out the most often on the 2008 Rangers:

Top 5: Highest BB%

Milton Bradley 16.2%

Jarrod Saltalamacchia 13.5%

Brandon Boggs 13.5%

Ramon Vazquez 11.2%

Marlon Byrd 10.2%

The list of highest BB% was encouraging to me, especially since it includes two young players: Saltalamacchia and Boggs. For all of the grief that Saltalamcchia endured last year in terms of power and batting average, he still ended the season with a .352 OBP, which shows his maturation in terms of understanding the strike zone. Now if he can learn to hit it once it's there . . .


Predictably, most of those who made the top 5 BB% list also made the K% list:

Top 5: Highest K%

Jarrod Saltalamacchia 37.4%

Brandon Boggs 32.9%

Chris Davis 29.8%

Milton Bradley 27.1%

Ramon Vazquez 22.0%

Despite the fact that I just said that it was encouraging that Saltalamacchia and Boggs were on the previous list, the fact that they are at the top of this one is somewhat troublesome. Why? In the case of Chris Davis, the number of strikeouts is still problematic, but he makes up for it by slugging .549. Same for Bradley, who also managed to hit .321 in addition to slugging .563. Saltalamacchia and Boggs slugged an underwhelming .364 and .399, respectively.


It stuck out to me that Marlon Byrd and Chris Davis are the only players not in both categories, which naturally led to . . .

Highest and Lowest BB/K ratio:

Marlon Byrd, the only player in the Top 5 BB% list not on the Top 5 K% list, was tops on the team in BB/K ratio with .74. This is a pretty remarkable feat, given how a high number of walks usually implies a high number of strikeouts. Marlon Byrd was arguably one of the most balanced hitters in the lineup in 2008.

Chris Davis, the only player in the Top 5 K% list not on the Top 5 BB% list, was lowest on the team in BB/K ratio with .23. While it is clear that Davis will continue to mash homeruns, the fact that he has such poor control of the strikezone is a bit worrisome. Unlike Byrd, there's no balance here.

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