You don't think that BABIP depends a lot on luck? It seems fairly self-evident.
Edit: bad luck on balls in play will bring down his OPS. I think you may be confusing cause and effect.
Last year Dustin was 389/450/547/997 in high leverage situations. His WPA was 3.21. His BABIP was 419 in high leverage situations. Was he lucky or MVP clutch.
The tendency to attribute luck to any BABIP that lies outside the MLB average, or even the players average, without any supporting data reduces BABIP to a luck-o-meter. We see bloops fall in for hits every day, or seeing eyed grounders, and LD's getting caught, so there is good luck and bad luck. But you can not see this from BABIP alone.
As alluded to already by VAL, BABIP is a function, given a large enough sample, of how well a player hits a ball. The harder a ball gets hit on the ground or a line the more likely it gets through the infield and in the case of a line drive drops without getting caught, with a FB of course, most hits are either bloops or hit far enough to hit the wall or go over it (in which case it is not a BIP and indirectly lowers a sluggers BABIP), or hard enough without being called a LD to drop in the gaps. If a FB stays in the park, the longer a ball stays in the air, the more likely it is to be caught (friendly fenway excepted with balls 20 ft off the wall).
From THT , Dustin has hit 40% FB this year, up from 36% last year. 86% are outs this year vs 83% last year. His HR/FB has dropped from 0.09 to 0.06. He went from + 3 runs vs avg last year on FB to -7 this year. He is hitting fewer GB and more of them are going for outs 72% vs 70%. Maybe fewer of his FB's are going off the wall (his doubles have went way down, 35 last year at home to 18 this year), maybe they are positioning him better on GB's, or he is not hitting his GB's as hard. How do you discern luck here?
His LD rate is about the same as last year. Perhaps fewer are falling in for hits, I don't have this data, but is this just regressing to mean (normal luck) from last years "lucky" season, or was last year normal luck and this year bad luck. If you want to play the luck card, you have to play both the good luck and bad luck cards. Too often luck is only rolled out when one of our guys is not performing as well as expected (not saying you do this).
There is some question as to whether clutch even exists, some say it is just luck, just like BABIP. Do some pitchers pitch better with ROB (as some claimed Dice-K does), or do some hitters hit better with ROB in close and late situations, or is it all luck as to when a hitter gets a hit or HR, maybe some years they come at clutchy times, other years not so clutchy times. I mean is it all luck Papi only has 1 HR and 10 RBI from innings 7-9 (compared to 8 HR, 27 RBI in innings 1-3, and 8 HR, 28 RBI in innings 4-6) or is there some other reason? For reference, in 2005 Papi had 17 HR and 45 RBI's from inning 7-9, but I am not comparing this papi with the 2009 version. If this is the case, WPA is just luck driven by the number of opportunities to hit in high leverage high WPA situations. Lucky hitters with plenty of opportunity have high WPA, unlucky hitters, or opportunity deprived hitters have low WPA. I believe clutch exists, but like RBI's and GIDP, WPA depends on opportunity, and there is some luck involved.
Edited by paulftodd, 17 August 2009 - 08:39 PM.
This topic is locked
