DownSwinging.com

Before I begin, in a shameless plug for the website, I invite you to check out this week’s Athletic Alley Blog Carnival, which features one of our stories prominently.

Now, onto the actual article.

For those of you who don’t know what BABIP is, I’ll give a brief explanation. BABIP literally stands for Batting Average for Balls In Play. That means essentially, that as long as you don’t strike out, walk, or hit a home run, whatever happened in your at bat is recorded in your BABIP (either you reached base or you didn’t).

When BABIP was shown to me a few years ago by a friend of mine, it was presented to me as being the measurement of luck in baseball. The idea was that if a pitcher had a high BABIP, he was getting unlucky, that the balls that hitters were hitting off of him were just falling in for hits more often than average. But that didn’t really make that much sense to me. I wondered about those guys that we say “pitch to contact,” who live off of groundball and/or flyball outs. The successful contact pitchers were ones that placed the ball in an area where it was difficult for the hitter to get good wood on the ball. Just because they weren’t racking up K’s to get their outs while not giving up a lot of hits doesn’t necessarily mean they were just lucky. Now when it comes to strikout pitchers, I believe BABIP is more valuable. Strikeout pitchers are trying to get their opponents to swing and miss more, and when they hit the ball, there might be more chance involved as to whether or not it falls in for hit. It’s far from definitive, but it matters more than if they’re contact pitchers. The point is that BABIP might be able to tell you something, but it doesn’t tell you everything.

In truth, I wasn’t sure if my theories were right until I read this article and the one below by Tristan Cockroft of ESPN, who basically said that you have to look at BABIP for groundballs, fly balls and line drives before you can really start to make a judgment on a player’s “luck.” In this other article, Cockroft breaks down the top and bottom 10 hitters and pitchers for groundballs, fly balls and line drives. I sort of wanted to do the same thing pretty soon, but I guess he just beat me to the punch.