4 ms·

Oddly enough, there actually is a baseball statistic that takes strikeouts out of the equation. It also takes out home runs. It's called Batting Average on Ball

by WillyF 15y ago

Oddly enough, there actually is a baseball statistic that takes strikeouts out of the equation. It also takes out home runs. It's called Batting Average on Balls In Play or BABIP. You can see the formula here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batting_average_on_balls_in_play http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batting_average_on_balls_in_pla... BABIP doesn't tell you a ton about a player's overall performance, but it does tell you how lucky they've been if you compare it to their historical BABIP. Some guys have awful years because their skills fall off a cliff (Adam Dunn is in that camp right now). But some player just have terribly unlucky seasons in terms of how defense affects the balls they put in play. If a player's BABIP is way down (or up), but his line drive rate, strikeout percentage, and home run rates are the same, you can make a good guess that his batting average will regress back towards his historical average. I'm sure if you told the average baseball fan about BABIP, he or she would call it BS. Yet, it's a great metric for determining whether a player's poor/excellent performance is sustainable.

eavc 15y ago
I'm a big fan of the BABIP against stat for pitchers for the same reason. It's amazing to see how good a pitcher can look when his fielders are getting to everything only to have him fall of the table when the law of averages kicks in the next season.
- corin_ 15y ago
  To give a very rough idea that works, but pitchers can vary so much, for example some of them, when at their best, get a bunch of strikeouts, others will get a bunch of groundouts/DPs. A pitcher who doesn't throw many strikeouts but consistently makes it very hard for a ball to be hit anywhere that isn't an easy play defensively could looka lot luckier than someone who gets a lot of strike outs, but when he does get hit gets hit badly.
  - eavc 15y ago
    True, but again, it's about variation from that individual's norm. A groundball pitcher will naturally have a good BABIP relative to others. If one year it's abnormally high for that person's history, though, it doesn't necessarily reflect an improvement in skill, though often these kinds of upticks in luck result in huge contracts. *fixed a typo
int3rnaut 15y ago
Here's a hilariously strange link for this discussion-- BABip explained, with Groupon ads plastered about. http://www.fenwaywest.com/2011-articles/june/sabermetrics-explained-babip.html http://www.fenwaywest.com/2011-articles/june/sabermetrics-ex... This part gets off topic but since we're talking SABERMETRICS!!... I'm not that great of a statistician and truthfully just pay attention to this stuff for fantasy baseball, but I always find that BABip isn't the greatest for hitters, and as great as the data is (for anyone interested fangraphs is a great resource) interpreting this data can be troubling--I mean at the end of the 2008 season people thought Dunn's BABip was an indicator that he'd just fell apart--but he did turn that around for 2 seasons... and I think that was merely a product of him going from the NLwest to the NLeast(do you think the NLeast has that good of collective fielders)--and then to the ALC where he'd square off against more often than not a top tiered defensive team where he's now struggling. I guess my question with BABip how do you interpret luck with decreasing skill level? I've looked at that quite closely trying to look for correlations with age etc, and I can never find anything that shows me that BABip for interpreting upcoming season potential is anything but a crapshoot.

by WillyF 15y ago

eavc 15y ago

I'm a big fan of the BABIP against stat for pitchers for the same reason. It's amazing to see how good a pitcher can look when his fielders are getting to everything only to have him fall of the table when the law of averages kicks in the next season.

corin_ 15y ago
To give a very rough idea that works, but pitchers can vary so much, for example some of them, when at their best, get a bunch of strikeouts, others will get a bunch of groundouts/DPs. A pitcher who doesn't throw many strikeouts but consistently makes it very hard for a ball to be hit anywhere that isn't an easy play defensively could looka lot luckier than someone who gets a lot of strike outs, but when he does get hit gets hit badly.
- eavc 15y ago
  True, but again, it's about variation from that individual's norm. A groundball pitcher will naturally have a good BABIP relative to others. If one year it's abnormally high for that person's history, though, it doesn't necessarily reflect an improvement in skill, though often these kinds of upticks in luck result in huge contracts. *fixed a typo

int3rnaut 15y ago

Here's a hilariously strange link for this discussion-- BABip explained, with Groupon ads plastered about. http://www.fenwaywest.com/2011-articles/june/sabermetrics-explained-babip.html http://www.fenwaywest.com/2011-articles/june/sabermetrics-ex... This part gets off topic but since we're talking SABERMETRICS!!... I'm not that great of a statistician and truthfully just pay attention to this stuff for fantasy baseball, but I always find that BABip isn't the greatest for hitters, and as great as the data is (for anyone interested fangraphs is a great resource) interpreting this data can be troubling--I mean at the end of the 2008 season people thought Dunn's BABip was an indicator that he'd just fell apart--but he did turn that around for 2 seasons... and I think that was merely a product of him going from the NLwest to the NLeast(do you think the NLeast has that good of collective fielders)--and then to the ALC where he'd square off against more often than not a top tiered defensive team where he's now struggling. I guess my question with BABip how do you interpret luck with decreasing skill level? I've looked at that quite closely trying to look for correlations with age etc, and I can never find anything that shows me that BABip for interpreting upcoming season potential is anything but a crapshoot.