hitting em where they ain't

by lboros on Jan 17, 2006 9:25 AM EST in St. Louis Cardinals News

john sickels wants to know: whither the nl central? "Do the Cardinals take this division handily?" he asks. "How soon will age catch up with them? Their farm system is improving but is this happening fast enough?" head on over and weigh in.

on to other matters. most cardinal fans rightly considered tony womack's outstanding 2004 season to be a fluke; he exceeded his career norms in batting average and on-base pct by 25 to 30 points. so none of us were terribly surprised to see his batting average drop by 58 points in 2005. it was almost too easy to predict.

my SB Nation brother jeff at Brew Crew Ball had a great post yesterday that attempts to identify the tony womacks of 2005 -- those who had fluke years and are likely to regress in 2006. his device is batting average on balls in play, or BABIP. jeff calls it "H/BIP," but it's the same thing:

"H/BIP" . . . measures how often a ball in play turned into a hit. This is heavily influenced by luck. While a fast guy like Brady [Clark] will tend to do better than average, numbers vary somewhat randomly from year to year. My point in all of this? H/BIP is one way to measure how lucky a player was. Carlos Lee, over his career, turns BIPs into hits about 29% of the time, but only managed 26% last year. If he had merely achieved his career average in his approximately 500 BIPs last year, the 3% difference would've given him another 15 hits or so, increasing his batting average to .290--much closer to his career average.

in other words, carlos lee was an anti-womack. he didn't hit the ball with any less authority than usual in 2005; he just hit the ball right into the defense more often than usual. when his luck turns (as it eventually must) and the hits start falling, lee's batting average will rise commensurately.

or so goes the theory. jeff backed up this line of reasoning yesterday with some empirical investigation. first he identified the majors' 30 luckiest hitters in 2004 -- those whose BABIP in 2004 exceeded their career BABIP by the largest amount. then he tracked their performance in 2005 to see if the hits kept falling. with one exception, they didn't: 29 of the 30 players saw their batting averages decline, and the one guy whose average went up did so by only 2 points. while a couple of the declines were mild ones -- jason varitek dropped from .296 to .281, michael barrett from .287 to .276 -- most were in the range of 30 to 50 points. tony womack ranked #22 on that list; he exceeded his career BABIP in 2004 by 27 points.

the upshot, says jeff, is this: "Very good BIP luck (relative to the player's career) is more or less unsustainable. Based on this small sample, anyway." that's an important caveat -- the sample is only one year. but those are some pretty emphatic results. so what does this tell us about 2006? jeff helpfully provided a list of 2005's luckiest hitters -- those whose 2005 BABIP most exceeded their career BABIP, and may therefore be due for a big decline in 2006. head on over there (via the link above) to see the full list; here are a few implications for the home team:

not surprisingly, abe nunez (the 2005 cards' answer to tony womack) ranked as the 8th luckiest hitter in 2005 per BABIP, exceeding his career standard by 32 points. most of us already thought it unlikely that nunez would hit .285 again in 2006; here's some data to back up our impression.
juan encarnacion ranked 6th on this list, exceeding his career BABIP by .034. that's not good. encar'cion's 2005 improvement was largely batting-average driven -- or, by this line of analysis, luck-driven. so we prob'y shouldn't be too shocked if he reverts to his typical .270 / .325 / .435 batting line in 2006.
derrek lee comes in at #14 on this chart, beating his norm by .028. again, this conforms with the typical fan's gut instinct -- viz., lee is not really a .335 hitter and will probably regress toward his career average (.276) in 2006.

encarnacion is the only 2006 cardinal on the list, which is a good thing. i checked a few other redbirds to see how they fared:

	2005 BABIP	career BABIP
eckstein	.306	.301
edmonds	.314	.328
pujols	.318	.324
bigbie	.300	.331
spivey	.314	.328

i'm happy to see that luck does not appear to have played a particularly large role in eckstein's stellar 2005 line. also, check out bigbie's spread; maybe he's due for a bounce this season.

there's another mode of stat-analysis out there that purports to measure batters' luck: jc bradbury's prOPS, about which i posted last month. bradbury's system is based on different data from jeff's system; jc uses more intricate batted-ball data like line-drive percentage and GB/FB ratio. nonetheless, his results true up pretty well with jeff's. let's just take the top 10 players on jeff's "luckiest hitters" list for 2005. the left column shows the number of points by which the player exceeded his career BABIP in 2005; the right-hand column shows the number of points by which the player exceeded his expected BA, per prOPS:

	exceeded career BABIP	exceeded expect'd BA per prOPS
lofton	.046	.048
conine	.039	.017
cameron	.038	.025
c guillen	.036	.044
encarnacion	.034	.017
a kennedy	.033	.032
nunez	.032	-.019
b roberts	.032	.013
clayton	.031	.010
damon	.031	.024

when two different systems, using different base data, are singing in harmony like that, it's usually a sign that they're on to something. if i was in a fantasy baseball league, i'd stay the hell away from the 10 guys on the table above.

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Sorry but...

If Damon is available, then Im taking him low 2nd round, high 3rd. In that lineup you may not need anyone else scoring runs on your team. Damon will be great in NY!

by TheGoat on Jan 17, 2006 11:00 AM EST reply actions

Do so at your own risk

It's not like he's switching from the Royals to the Yankees, and the guy plays with an old body.

by Valatan on Jan 17, 2006 1:04 PM EST reply actions

Marquis gets a raise

Pitcher Jason Marquis and the St. Louis Cardinals agreed Tuesday to a $5.15 million, one-year contract, a raise of $2.1 million.

I guess that's the middle of what they would have asked for at arbitration. Still - it adds $600k to the "Roster Matrix" ...

by STLEdge on Jan 17, 2006 1:32 PM EST reply actions

The ever vigilant

LB has already made the change. In looking at the 'caster, I notice that Seabol is still on there. Wasn't he non-tendered? What did I miss or do I not know?

by flynn on Jan 17, 2006 2:54 PM EST up reply actions

Hitting projections

The flaw in the analytic systems you quote in your post is that neither leaves any possibility for a hitter to improve, attributing any gains to luck. It is true that players tend to revert to their historic performances, but there are numerous instances of players learning new approaches, taking better advantage of skills, etc. If we rule out that possibility then we should fire all the hitting, pitching, and any other skill coach.

by oldbirdwatcher on Jan 17, 2006 1:56 PM EST reply actions

fair question old bird

but not all gains are equal. for example, if a player drastically cut his strikeout rate and put the ball in play more often, his average would go up even if his BABIP remained the same. that would be a real improvement in batting skill, as opposed to just better luck in terms of where the ball falls.

ditto if he raises his home-run rate. a home-run is not considered a "ball in play," because it's not subject to being caught by a fielder. so if a player increases his HR from 12 to 27, that too would raise his batting average (15 extra hits) even if his BABIP remained the same.

i'll grant that it's probably not as cut and dried as it appears here. there must be hitters who learn to hit more line drives and fewer pop-ups, and can sustain that improvement.

but at the same time, when 29 out of 30 guys on a list fail to sustain their gains in batting avg . . . well that could happen by random chance, but it doesn't seem very likely, does it? at the very least it merits further inquiry

by lboros on Jan 17, 2006 2:41 PM EST up reply actions

just another thought

we're only talking about the high end of the spectrum here --- ie, guys whose BABIP is .025 or more above their established level of ability. i think it's plausible that at this end of the bell curve, the improvement we see is largely the product of luck most of the time. less dramatic year-to-year gains --- 10 to 15 points, let's say --- may be a different story.

by lboros on Jan 17, 2006 4:03 PM EST up reply actions

My first post

How do those methods contend with defenses figuring out where to play certain hitters? Some hitters are very predictable, some spray, and/or change hitting styles year to year so are harder to defense. And Tony Gwynn could always "hit it where they ain't" It was a skill for him not luck.

First time poster. Have checked on your site now and then since the Burnett frenzy. I'm hooked!

by vince eating tarp on Jan 17, 2006 2:53 PM EST reply actions

also good questions

and thanks for reading and posting, VET. in gwynn's case, my guess --- and i can't prove it, i don't even know if the data exist --- is that he hit a higher-than-usual percentage of line drives, hence had a consistently high BABIP.

but suppose gwynn had established, over the course of several years, that he hits .375 on balls in play. then one year his BABIP shoots up to .430, and his overall batting average for the year climbs to .400. everybody knows he's not REALLY a .400 hitter, right? and nobody expects him to bat .400 the following season; we all understand that he's more likely to hit .350 the next year than .400; hell, he's more likely to hit .350 than he is to hit .360.

we would intuitively grasp that gwynn (or any .400 hitter) simply got "hot" (another term for "lucky") one season, and the hits fell for him a little more generously than usual.

all we're doing with BABIP data is applying the same principle to hitters with batting averages that fall lower down on the spectrum. if a player with a well-established level of ability suddenly and unexpectedly exceeds that level of ability for one season, he's probably going to come back to earth. nobody stays hot forever.

that's all the BABIP data are really saying. it's a tool with which we can try to forecast how likely it is that a player will sustain a higher level of play, and how likely it is that the player will regress.

by lboros on Jan 17, 2006 3:15 PM EST up reply actions

This is where statisticians...

start to lose me. I agree with you that a good chunk of the time, especially for guys like Womack and Nunez, luck plays a large role in how "hot" a player is, but I would contend that a player like Edmonds' ridiculous streaks (pre-2005) derived themselves from something clicking in his head and not from having an extra blooper or two fall in. 2005's relative consistency was an anomaly compared with the previous years of his production.

Edmonds' 2004 Avg Obp Slg OPS lines by month
.286 .367 .595 .962
.232 .351 .484 .835
.311 .422 .554 .976
.381 .475 .952 1.427
.359 .519 .795 1.314
.267 .400 .533 .933

Do you really think that hitting for over an .800 slugging for 2 months was lucky? 23 of his 42 homers were hit in 2 months. Home runs are luck? I guess you can contend that he was lucky in guessing pitches right, there really wasn't any "in-between month".

JEd 2003:
.391 .500 .768 1.268
.223 .305 .479 .784
.344 .432 .865 1.297
.224 .356 .483 .839
.238 .384 .513 .897
.191 .309 .532 .841

Again, he goes from being better than Pujols for 70 AB's to Wily Mo Pena and back to Pujols+ and back to Pena with this time even less in between.

JEd 2002:
.355 .500 .724 1.224
.330 .431 .582 1.013
.237 .293 .447 .740
.341 .441 .692 1.133
.257 .344 .385 .729
.324 .457 .521 .978

Same thing...

There's no way in the world that you can convince me that Edmonds god-like months are a result of luck. Something hits right in his head and suddenly he can hammer that pitch at his shoulders instead of swinging and missing. He's a rarity in terms of hot-cold non-luck, but I don't think it is possible to believe his streaks are a statistical variance called "luck".

On the flip side of this debate over luck's role, we have the model of consistency: Albert Pujols. His highest deviation of any month from his yearly OPS is .151 points in his May 2002 season. If I counted on my way right, he only had 4 months since 2002 where his monthly OPS fluctuated by more than .100 points. That is consistency for you.

Does "luck" not affect him as much as someone else? Pujols' less than 10% (around 6.5 I would have to guess, who has their calculators ready?) standard deviation per monthly OPS has to rank among the lowest in the league, probably the lowest if I had to guess. Why is that? Are his hits less conducive to being affected by luck? Have the baseball gods smiled upon him? Ultimately the answer is no, Pujols does not have some statistician on his shoulder helping him prevent statistical variance. Pujols incredible consistency is a result of his insatiable drive for being the best--adjusting mid-game by checking out video on his at-bats, making sure to keep hitting mechanics solid, staying focused.

A diamond is just a lump of coal that performed well under pressure

by joker24 on Jan 17, 2006 4:51 PM EST up reply actions

nobody's saying the entire game is based on luck

but would you deny that luck plays any part in the game? surely you've seen one batter hit a sizzling line drive that goes straight to the shortstop, and the next guy bloops one over the shortstop's head. the 1st hitter was unlucky, and the 2d hitter was lucky.

in most cases the luck evens out over time --- but "over time" doesn't necessarily mean "over one season." a player can have extremely good or bad luck for an entire season, and that can skew his batting line one way or the other.

this is not to say that luck distorts every player's stats --- but it does distort a few players at the margins.

a smart organization will learn to recognize those players at the margins of the luck spectrum and dump players --- like womack in 2004, or abe nunez in 2005 --- who have been especially lucky and are not as good as the stats suggest. and conversely, a smart organization will stick with a player who has had an unlucky season.

as for the edmonds home run example, home runs are definitely not luck --- and that's why they're excluded from the formula for BABIP. it's not luck if you drive the ball over the fence. but when one batter drives a ball 300 feet into the gap, and the other hits the same ball just as hard but it's 15 feet closer to the line, and an outfielder can run it down ---- i don't see how you could characterize that as a difference in ability. one hitter has simply been luckier than the other.

to reiterate --- the luck usually evens out for most players. but occasionally it doesn't even out, and when that's the case it's better to see it for what it is than to misconstrue luck as ability.

by lboros on Jan 17, 2006 6:13 PM EST up reply actions

I agree with that, but

my post was a response to the statement "simply got "hot" (another term for "lucky")"

A diamond is just a lump of coal that performed well under pressure

by joker24 on Jan 17, 2006 6:23 PM EST up reply actions

Good points

on both sides of this one; it's an issue that really interests me, so I'll dive in late with some scattered thoughts:

-Month-by-month splits have never meant too much to me. Let's say a guy hits .250 in June, .350 in July, and .250 in August. Gosh, what a streaky guy--prone to cold spells but packing the ability to "turn it on." But if we simply draw the split lines differently, e.g., between the 15th of each month, now we have a guy who essentially hits .300 two months in a row. Gosh, what a consistent, steady hitter. The point is that splitting up stats into these kinds of small, arbitrary samples can lead to spurious conclusions. Does anyone really think that as soon as the calendar flips to July, some players just start hammering the ball? Doubtful.

-That said, I agree with joker that the notion "getting hot = getting lucky" needs some revision (although I'm sure lboros didn't mean to just baldly assert that equation). That equation seems to apply mostly to hitting for average, less to power hitting and still less on on-base abilities. I mean, no one talks very much about someone "having a hot batting eye this month."

-The real problem is that folks apply the term "getting hot" to players of wildly various skill levels. So the term by itself means very little, since we're not sure how much a given "hot streak" owes to luck and how much it owes to skill. That's precisely what's so useful about looking at career production and stats like BABIP : they give us some context. If Albert Pujols goes on a 20-game stretch of hitting .380, that's a good stretch, but it's not absurd considering what Albert's done in his career; therefore, it probably has a good deal of skill involved. If Abe Nunez does the same thing, well...the contextual information we have about Ol' Abe tells us that it's gotta be mostly luck, right?

by Hummingbird on Jan 17, 2006 11:16 PM EST up reply actions

As I was posting

I was thinking of how arbitrary June 1 vs. May 30 is as I was typing, but I think the point still comes through even with that; Pujols doesn't have variation, Edmonds does--it's not a matter of luck. It always seems Edmonds' switch might be just that arbitrary though. Go 0-5 with 5 k's and then 4-4 with 2 homers and a double. Guy amazes me all the time.

A diamond is just a lump of coal that performed well under pressure

by joker24 on Jan 17, 2006 11:30 PM EST up reply actions

Not for Streaks

Your point on going 0-5 with 5 k's doesn't figure with batting average for balls in play. When Jimmies hot, it seams he is more adept at fouling off tough pitches, and crushing mistakes, better than anybody. Maybe someone can come up with a stat to compare the ability to foul off pitches with hot streaks.

Fan for Life. Go Cards.

by Birds on the Bat on Jan 18, 2006 12:08 AM EST up reply actions

Luck, Edmonds and Strikouts

First off I'd say the luck or hot streaks we see players performance could more appropriately be called variation. If we wated to measure this, the best way would be to use a rolling average rather than arbitrary cut off. (Maybe a 30 day or 100AB rolling average)

I imagine the variation that we'd then see in JEd's day-to-day or month to month stats have something to do with his approach at the plate. Do you suppose other high SO, power guys would have a similar variation?

by Zubin on Jan 18, 2006 1:02 AM EST up reply actions

Jenc & BABIP

The BABIP is interesting to be sure, but what it implies is certainly in question. We could look back at Womack and Nunez to try to explain peak seasons, or it could be more interesting to check this stat against hitters that draw the most aggressive fielder realignments. But it is more interesting to me to try to further the discussion of Jenc, and his prospects far getting still better with the birds than the fish.

From the hitting charts provided from "Charts and Minds" of Jan 3rd, it was observed that Jenc is dead-pull for extra bases. But fly-outs and singles are pretty well scattered to all fields.

If the graphics transfer, I've copied them here for reference.
Jenc Extra Base Hits:

Jenc Fly-outs:

Jenc Singles `05:

The charts still can't help explain BABIP. But looking to Jenc's stats for the last two seasons, the only appreciable difference is that he got more singles, while extra base hits was static and stike outs rose.

Year G AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI BB SO BA OBP SLG TB
+--------------+---+----+----+----+---+--+---+----+---+--+---+---+-----+
2004 135 484 63 114 30 2 16 62 38 86 .236 .299 .405 196
2005 141 506 59 145 27 3 16 76 41 104 .287 .349 .447 226

So the hitting chart we're missing is career for singles vs. that of 2005. If Jenc is dead pull for extra base hits, but scatters both singles and fly-outs, did his distribution of singles change in 2005? Did he learn something he can retain and even build on, or just get lucky? Fair to say his biggest opportunity may be to convert SO's to balls in play.

Fan for Life. Go Cards.

by Birds on the Bat on Jan 17, 2006 10:23 PM EST up reply actions

Economy signing?

I agree that Nelson was an "economy signing" but, really, what other kinds are left as far as relievers go? Rodriguez? Who else? And would any of them be worth it?

One thing that I, and probably only I, find interesting: should he make the team, Nelson MIGHT have a bit of advantage over career NL hitters who have never seen him before. But, to make the team he must impress in spring training, where he will be facing, potentially, lots of AL hitters who might know him all too well. Effectively, he may have to clear his highest hurdle first. (and yes, I realize that the AL teams in ST will be littered with minor leaguers, etc., but still.....)

by flynn on Jan 17, 2006 4:51 PM EST reply actions