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By Todd Jacobson

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Fun with BABIP

June 12, 2007 3:14 pm

            Luck plays a factor in baseball perhaps more than any other sport. Fielders make spectacular plays to turn line drives into outs and flares off the end of the bat fall in for hits.

           Players complain about hitting balls hard and not seeing results, while pitchers talk about making good pitches that somehow find holes. And in between the clichés, there’s some truth to those complaints, some serendipity involved in handfuls of plays each game.

            No player gets hot just by talent alone. It truly is better to be lucky than good sometimes, and there’s a statistic that attempts to measure these sorts of things, trying to discern which players have been luckier than others in a course of the season. Because if there’s one thing about luck, it always changes, and by looking at what players have been lucky, or unlucky, it is sometimes possible to discern which players fortunes might turn.

            It’s called Batting Average on Balls In Play, a seamhead statistic if there ever was one. Take away strikeouts and homers (because fielders can’t make a play on balls over the fence), and consider the results like a batting average. The major league mean, historians have found, is between .290 and .310. Anything below it and the hitter is getting a little unlucky. Anything above and those bouncing balls through the infield aren’t likely to keep finding holes. Like everything, even baseball statistics regress to the mean over time.

            BABIP, however, can be a valuable tool to see which players are truly hot or just a bit unlucky. Of course, it should only be taken so far. A weak grounder is a weak grounder, and if you’re hitting too many of those, you’ll need a lot more than luck.

            Consider the case of 3B Ryan Zimmerman. He’s hitting .243 with nine homers and 35 RBIs, but all season, he’s not complained of a slump – rather he says he is happy with his approach at the plate. Moreover, he says many would-be hits have simply ended on the wrong of a fielder’s glove. He might be right.

           Taking away his nine homers and 44 strikeouts, Zimmerman’s average on the balls that have ended up in play is .262, slightly below the league average. It's nothing extraordinary, but it's easy to say that with a few more grounders finding holes, his average might climb to the .270 range. Of course, Zimmerman has nothing to complain about. He hit .287 last season, and his BABIP was a quite fortunate .342.

           Here’s a look at how the Nationals hitters have fared this year (with their career BABIP entering this season in parentheses). Take a close look at the high BABIPs for 1B Dmitri Young and SS Cristian Guzman:

The fortunate ones                              BA      BABIP

            1B Dmitri Young                       .342     .389 (.324)

            SS Cristian Guzman                  .346     .386 (.297)

            INF Ronnie Belliard                  .295     .338 (.303)

            INF Tony Batista                      .304     .350 (.259)

About average

            LF Ryan Church                       .269     .311 (.338)

            CF Nook Logan                       .230     .309 (.324)

            RF Austin Kearns                     .249     .288 (.316)

            2B Felipe Lopez                       .231     .277 (.320)

Can’t we get a break?

            1B Robert Fick                        .197     .271 (.283)

            C Jesus Flores                          .224     .268 (NA)

            3B Ryan Zimmerman                .243     .262 (.342)

            C Brian Schneider                    .236     .258 (.289)

            OF Ryan Langerhans                .146     .233 (.323)

            BABIP can be an even better tool lucky at pitchers. Which have been lucky? Not so lucky?

            Here’s a glimpse into how each Nationals pitcher with more than 20 innings has fared in terms of BABIP:

The fortunate ones                            IP            BABIP

            RHP Jason Bergmann               49             .183

            RHP Shawn Hill                       50             .240

            LHP Micah Bowie                    35 2/3      .245

            RHP Jesus Colome                   40 2/3      .258

About average

            LHP Mike Bacsik                     29            .279

            RHP Jerome Williams               30            .283

            LHP Matt Chico                       66 2/3      .290

            RHP Jon Rauch                        30 2/3      .298

            RHP Chad Cordero                 29 1/3       .301

            RHP Saul Rivera                      34 1/3       .311

Can’t we get a break?

            RHP Jason Simontacchi            41 1/3       .316

            RHP John Patterson                 31 1/3        .321

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Todd Jacobson is a sports writer for The Free Lance-Star

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Todd Jacobson is covering the Washington Nationals.