It’s the BABIP, stupid
For this week’s Metro column, I felt obligated to talk about David Ortiz’s 3-for-43 slump to start the year. It was all anyone in Boston was talking about—radio call-in shows, sports TV, newspaper inches. Nothing was off-limits—people were talking about his weight, his batting stance, his knees, his schedule, his mindset. But I didn’t really want to chime in. I felt that this particular zone had been flooded. Plus, slumps happen. You know? I’m sure David will find a way to crank 30 jacks and get on base and OPS at or near 1.000 before the year is out. He’s David Orfreakingtiz! He’s only 32! The man they call Big Papi! Every time he smiles, a rainbow appears, an unseen band strikes up a John Philip Sousa march, and an angel gets its wings! He’ll be fine! He’ll be more than fine! But I didn’t want to write one of those “everyone take a chill pill, man” columns, because although they are sometimes necessary, they leave a patronizing aftertaste.
Then, on Monday, Coley wrote this post on slow starters and what they’re saying, and I read the following:
Jason Giambi (.107, 2 HR, 4 RBI) “If I’ve been frustrated by anything, it’s that I feel so good and I’m hitting the ball hard and I had nothing to show for it.”
That quote triggered something in my brain. You know how in movies, someone says something revealing and then the heroine gets a sort of spaced-out look on her face as she suddenly remembers all this other relevant information in flashback/voiceover mode? Like this:
Well, Giambi’s comment triggered much the same reaction in yours truly. And just as Scarlett hears, “Tara….Tara!….the red earth of TARA,” I suddenly remembered reading the following quotation about Ortiz:
“He’s hitting some balls hard right at people,” said Red Sox pitching coach Dave Magadan. “He hasn’t had a whole lot of balls fall in for him.”
The pieces all fell into place. Inside my brain, I heard, “BABIP….BABIP!….It’s got to be his BABIP!”
I cruised on over to David’s page on The Hardball Times, and sure enough, going into Monday night’s game, his BABIP was a miniscule .063. He’d hit a few more grounders than he usually does, and had a few more K’s, but given the small sample size we were dealing with, those differences were tiny compared with his jaw-droppingly low BABIP. I felt compelled to look for more low BABIPs, and the search quickly proved fruitful. Giambi’s BABIP was even smaller (.043 at the time). A lot of the Detroit Tigers had low BABIP’s, too. And in a particularly sad twist of fate, Alfonso Soriano had a depressed BABIP when Sun-Times columnist Greg Couch called him selfish compared with newcomer Kosuke Fukudome. 
Fukudome, said Couch, plays the game “the right way.” Fukudome’s BABIP? An unsustainably high .385 heading into last night. Nice one, Greg.
It seemed like the baseball world was overdue for a crash course in BABIP, so I rapped out the column and sent it in post-haste.
The very next day, while I was at the gym, I was watching NESN (the New England Sports Network, which broadcasts nearly all the Bruins and Red Sox games). Globe columnist Bob Ryan has a talk show on the network called Globe 10.0, and I listened in horror when he speculated that maybe there was something wrong with Papi’s eyesight—”You remember,” he said to his guest [I'm paraphrasing slightly], “What happened when Jim Rice lost his eyesight. 
That’s not the first thing people think of when a player’s in a slump, but you know, it could be…” I actually felt Red Sox Nation shudder at the very idea.
Moreover, I then read that Papi himself seemed to think he had some sort of mental problem (”I know exactly what I’m doing wrong. Everything is right here,” he told reporters while pointing to his head). Sure, you’re hitting the ball right at people, maybe start getting irate at a few borderline calls, and then you start doubting yourself, which leads to pressing and swinging at pitches out of the zone. In that case, it makes sense to sit the guy before he does himself any more damage, as Terry Francona did earlier this week. But the slump didn’t start in Big Papi’s head. And it’s not going to end there.
Finally, I think it’s really sad that Miguel Cabrera, another slow starter with a low BABIP, said, “I feel bad. I feel like everybody’s behind me, laughing.” And the more I thought 
about it, the sadder it seemed.
Outside of maybe a few fantasy baseball bloggers, no one knew about the BABIP situation—not the media, not the sluggers themselves, not even the managers and front offices. And now real people were suffering because of it! Bob Ryan has perhaps just convinced thousands of viewers that David Americo Ortiz will pull a Jim Rice on us (as if we didn’t have Lasik now, anyway) and have his last 20-homer season at 33. David himself thinks he’s mental. And poor little Miguel Cabrera thinks we’re all laughing at him! This cannot be.
BABIP! Spread the word and put power back in the hands of the people. Peace.
April 17th, 2008 at 10:40 am
Ortiz’s 13 strikeouts in 16 games aren’t helping, either.
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April 17th, 2008 at 10:58 am
But Papi’s K/game rate is actually not that different from what it usually is, Danny O. Right now it’s .81. Since he’s been in Boston, it’s fluctuated between .64 and .88. Last year it was lower (.69), but he was hurt and hitting more for average than for homers.
Plus, you know if the wind had been blowing out on a couple of those deep fly balls, he’d easily have 3 more homers already.
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April 17th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
I know he’s always had a lot of strikeouts. He’s on pace for 132 this year, one shy of a career high. That’s gonna hurt anyone’s average.
BTW, since they unearthed the jersey from the concrete in the Bronx (which I can’t believe hasn’t created any UmpBump chatter), Ortiz is 4 for 15. Not great, but a definite improvement! Perhaps there is a mystical explanation for his slow start…
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April 17th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
Can’t you credit his low BABIP to the fact that he’s weakly grounding out or popping out when he does make contact? This is just observational from the first two games vs. the Yankees but he looked terrible.
Anyone’s BABIP is going to be low in a slump unless you’re doing nothing but striking out and hitting homeruns.
The Mo Vaughn comparison is pretty unavoidable. His BABIP dropped about 70 points when he fell off a cliff in 1999. Big fat dude in his thirties. Knee explodes. Sound familiar?
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April 17th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
he’s getting walked a lot though, and not intentionally as usual, so he IS seeing the ball well - he’s first on the team in walks, right above Ellsbury, who appears to be having the same problem - he gets walked a lot so he’s definitely being selective, but he’s also not hitting. does that just mean they are both being overly selective batters? Ellsbury appears to have an Eckstein-like approach to the game - get on base any way you can - and he’s young and still learning how to work major league pitchers.
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April 17th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
Lyndsay, I agree with you about Ellsbury. He’s on my fantasy team, and I’m always like, no no, swing away! Drive in runs! :) But actually, I think for him it does make sense to be a little overly patient—I’d rather have it be that way than the other way around, for a rookie. Plus, he’s so goddamn fast that he doesn’t need to hit doubles, he can just walk and then steal second.
@ Brian, Papi’s had a few weak groundouts/popups, but I have also seen plenty of PAs this year where he has hit the ball well and it has been juuuust within reach of an opposing fielder. That’s why in cases like this, I try not to trust my eyes. Sure, he’s taken some ugly hacks. So have Manny Ramirez and JD Poo, however, who are both scorching hot right now. I feel like the human tendency to “recruit data” is just too great. Those who think he has a knee problem will focus on weak grounders. Those who think it’s an eyesight problem will focus on his K’s. Etc. Papi’s BABIP is so extraordinarily low right now, given his pretty constant walk rates, K rates, GB rates, etc, it seems like it just has to be a statistical fluke. I have been looking for evidence of lingering knee pain, but he seems to be running just fine.
As for Mo Vaughn, I would love to examine his 1999 BABIP. What website are you using to find it? I usually use Baseball Reference for retired players but they don’t do BABIP. Please…share the wealth.
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April 17th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
…whereas Ortiz has no speed on the basepaths (and also a DH) so his usefulness is completely at the plate. what this all means…I dont know.
Sarah, can you and Bill James explain to me what it means when a batter has a high walk rate but a low hit rate? I started on an idea that I don’t quite know how to finish.
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April 17th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
Hehe. Well, a high walk rate means he’s patient and sees a lot of pitches. A lower hit rate would mean he doesn’t make contact as much. A player with a high walk rate and a low hit rate has a good eye but maybe not as much speed or bat control. I’m going to ramble on for a paragraph now:
Sometimes players with high walk rates also have really high strikeout rates, like Youk and Ortiz—they see a ton of pitches and go really deep into counts. Sometimes, players with high strikeout rates *dont* have high walk rates, though, because they’re impatient (Wily Mo!). A player with a high rate of contact and not a lot of patience would have a higher average but a relatively low OBP (Alex Sanchez back in the day). The reverse case would be last year, when Jason Varitek still had a lower-than-his-average batting average, but his OBP was up where it usually is. A player can lose bat speed as he ages, but still see the ball well enough to know when not to swing. Old sluggers can still crank a pitch down the middle, and they can still walk, but they don’t hit as many singles and doubles.
Okay, I am done rambling. This is just by way of saying that average and OBP don’t always track each other. The gap in between can tell you whether a hitter gets on by slap-hitting and running fast (Ichiro) or by being more selective and drawing more walks. I was reading this blog post recently on how they should just get rid of the BA stat, but I like having it around, at least to compare with OBP.
I hope this makes sense. The end.
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April 17th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
Bill James says taking a base on balls is a “veteran player skill” because it involves an older ballplayer compensating for slower reflexes and bat speed. James said the increase in walks will eventually result in a decrease in batting average because the pitchers will adjust and will begin to make the hitters hit good pitches.
Is this Ortiz’s problem? Are pitchers collectively saying, “No more freebies, David! We’re going to make you hit it?”
I doubt it. While Ortiz’s walk rate went way up the last two years, so did his batting average. In other words, he’s not becoming more selective due to a loss of quickness. He’s just becoming a more dangerous hitter.
Maybe that’s repeating a lot of what Sarah said, but I used the words “Bill” and “James” in my rant, so I win.
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April 17th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
You know what, Coley? I re-read what I wrote, and I’m not even sure what I said. So you definitely win.
My head hurts.
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April 17th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Coley, Ortiz’ OBP spike in 2006 had a lot to do with all those intentional walks he got that year. In 2007, it had to do more with a batting average that’s bound to drop in 2008 (.332 is far too high for David).
Ortiz is still walking at the same rate he usually does.
And what James was talking about (which I think is the same thing referenced here) is for sudden increase over one year. Ortiz has had a good walk rate for a few years now.
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April 17th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
BR does BABIP in the splits section.
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April 17th, 2008 at 4:00 pm
Also, Sarah, I made this for you:
http://i122.photobucket.com/albums/o262/bsadecki/pedroia.gif
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April 17th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
Sarah,
Papi’s lowly BABIP should be interpreted as another indication of his slump, not an explanation for it. In your metro column, you write that the “law of averages dictates that what goes around comes around.” In statistics and probability, the Law of Large Numbers says that as Papi has more and more at-bats, his batting average and BABIP will approach their “true” theoretical values. This is not to be confused with a statement that bad hitting luck gets shared among players, a statement which has no mathematical backing.
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April 17th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
Math owned!
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April 17th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
Suz, I know you know more about math than I ever will, but I don’t really see how saying that Papi’s averages will eventually approach their “true theoretical value” is that different from what I wrote in my column. I feel like you just put in mathspeak what I put in English major-speak. To your other point, sure, you could take Papi’s low BABIP as an indication of his slump and not the other way around, but only if he were really hitting nothing but weak-ass grounders. Yes, his GB% is slightly up, but because of the small sample size that translates to like four extra grounders. His infield fly % is effectively the same as it was last year—not more pop-ups than usual, in other words. One thing that has been precipitously down is his home run/fly ball percentage, but as I said above, a few nice gusts of wind could easily have fixed that. The only thing that could really be having this dramatic an effect on his BABIP is, perhaps, the defensive shift that opposing teams use against him—but they did that last year too and it didn’t help them. So I guess I just don’t see what evidence there is that his BABIP is a result of the slump instead of the other way around.
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April 17th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
Oh, and Brian, thanks for the tip about BR….I guess?
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April 17th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
Why is it that the GB% is subject to small sample size but nothing else is?
Also, those gusts of wind were there last season. And they’re there for every other player. I don’t think it’s fair to take that into consideration.
You clearly have conclusion already in mind and you’re playing a shell game to try to get there.
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April 17th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
Wow, Brian, here we are at comment #18 and it took you this entire time to start with the vitriolic accusations. That must be a new record. Congratulations.
My point is that this *entire slump* is due to small sample size and a few bad breaks. Is Papi in a slump? Yes. But it’s not really as bad and panic-inducing as his .121 average would have people believe, and everyone—EVERYONE—has slumps from time to time. If you have evidence or a reasoned argument to the contrary, let’s hear it.
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April 17th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
So the whole point of your article is “Papi is in a slump”?
Why not just say that and not make wind and bad-math excuses?
I don’t think accusing you of predetermination is that vitriolic.
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April 17th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
I think it’s pretty clear what my article is about and what my point is. People are up in arms because Papi’s in a slump. Everyone has a theory—eyesight, knees, Vitamin Water, whatever—and I’m saying, no, it’s just bad luck, which you can see in his BABIP, and he’ll be fine. It’s not complex, but it is a different argument than has been made anywhere else.
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April 17th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
And you’re not bothered by the fact that you’re using BABIP totally incorrectly?
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April 17th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
Brian, what is your argument?
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April 17th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
My argument is that there is no way to tell why Ortiz is hitting like he’s hitting.
Say, for example, there was something wrong with his knee or his swing. His BABIP wouldn’t still be in the 300s. It would be really low because he’s pulling off the ball or tapping grounders to second.
I’m not saying that Boston fans should be in hysterics about Ortiz but if you look at Vaughn as a pretty good comp, you’d see that the knee problem could cause him to suddenly fall off a cliff.
The point is that you can’t point out the reason for his performance so far on April 17th. At least, not like this.
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April 17th, 2008 at 5:49 pm
Brian, why is it that you never seem to like anything we write and yet you keep coming back?
Dude, I have to ask.
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April 17th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
That’s not the case. I just only comment when I don’t agree. I’m going to be a horrible father.
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April 17th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
Okay, thanks for clarifying. Basically, I’ve looked at everything I can think of and all I’ve found so far is that David has like three or four more groundballs and has left a couple extra balls on the warning track instead of in the stands. That’s not enough to account for such a precipitous drop in BABIP. If there was something wrong with his swing and he was tapping more grounders to second or whatever, that would show up somewhere else in his stats—but all his other peripheral hitting stats are basically the same! Which makes the depressed BABIP basically the only thing that really stands out. Now, from watching David every night, it does seem like he’s just hitting a lot of balls right at guys, which would account for a lower BABIP. I think my argument that a lot of this slump is just flukey goes along with the fact that it’s still just mid-April. No, he doesn’t look great right now, but it’s more like a .250 level of mild suckage than his current .120 level of total suckage. I think the BABIP explains that suckage gap. Plus, to a larger point, a lot of the guys who are hot right now (Gabe Kapler?!) are not going to be hot in another month when David Ortiz is back to being David Ortiz. Also, I have to note that last year when he did have knee problems, he hit for a career high average. So if he does have a knee problem now, it might explain a lower HR rate, but it wouldn’t explain the rest.
Okay, that’s wrong. Gabe Kapler will still be hot, technically speaking. He just won’t have a home run/flyball percentage of 40 and a BABIP of .350.
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April 17th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
I disagree that we’re saying the same thing in different words, Sarah. I think almost any statistician would agree that 67 at-bats is a large enough sample size to show that we’re seeing the effects of a real slump in Papi’s hitting right now, not just a fluke or bad luck.
Here comes the super-nerdy part: if we model Papi’s at-bats as a binomial process (nnngaaahhh), with the “true theoretical value” of Papi’s batting average as his current career average (.287), then the probability of getting only 7 hits in his last 60 at-bats (to give a batting average of .117) just by pure bad luck is estimated as .15%, less than one percent! This is just an estimate from the simplest possible model, but my point is that the probability of this slump being simply bad luck is very, very small.
Oh, and yeah, Brian, I pity your offspring too. :)
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April 17th, 2008 at 9:30 pm
here’s another theory that no one has suggested - anyone know how his marriage is going? anyone in his family sick? aka, the J.D. Drew factor.
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April 17th, 2008 at 11:07 pm
Suz,
Are you saying that the probability of a career .287 hitter getting only 7 hits in 60 at bats is .15%? If that is true then how does this eliminate bad luck as a determining factor? I don’t understand how the fact that there was only a .15% chance of this occurring proves that it wasn’t bad luck. Wouldn’t it be possible that the low probability of this occurring actually illustrates that it is in fact a fluke and highly improbable? I don’t understand how you are equating the low probability of this happening with the causing factor.
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April 17th, 2008 at 11:47 pm
Hey Melissa,
Aha, no, let me try to rephrase. I’m thinking of Papi’s batting average as what probabilists call a random variable– so I’m taking the view that every time he gets up at the plate, he either gets a hit or not with a certain probability. If his unlucky streak is really just plain bad luck, then he has some non-sucky probability of getting a hit each time. I picked .287, his career average, as a reasonable ballpark (heh) number to illustrate my point. If this were really the case, then the probability of him getting only 7 out of 60 hits just by pure chance, is .15%.
What is much more likely is that, due to a knee injury or bad eyesight or marital problems or some concrete cause, the probability of success associated with Papi’s hitting is (hopefully temporarily) just really low, so his lack of hits is not a freak incident.
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April 18th, 2008 at 12:18 am
Thanks for clarifying. If your theory is correct then it tends to negate the possibility that good hitters can slump for no specific reason.
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April 18th, 2008 at 6:39 am
Suz, I completely understand what you are saying, and I’m sure your math is correct, but I think your interpretion of what that means is incorrect. It is important to understand not only what BABIP is, but the theory behind what it means.
The thing is, we have massive amounts of evidence that players have very little control of what happens to a ball once it leaves their bat. Basically, we know this because over HUGE sample sizes across hundreds of thousands of at bats and thousands of players, BABIP falls into an extremely narrow range, roughly between .290 and .310, across all types of hitters in all types of ballparks. This includes every hitter with a knee injury or marital problems.
Basically, if you can manage to make contact with the ball at all, you have about a 30% chance of reaching base safely, no matter who you are or how bad your knees are or how many groundballs or flyballs you hit.
So when we see that Ortiz’s BABIP is a ridiculously low .063 (over a small sample size), we can say with pretty much absolute certainty that he is having extremely fluky bad luck. This doesn’t mean that Ortiz doesn’t have bad knees or something, but we have mountains of evidence that bad knees or any other human factors simply can’t drop your BABIP that low. Bad knees or bad eyesight or whatever aside, the vast majority of Ortiz’s current slump *must* be blamed on fluky bad luck - Sarah’s interpretation is absolutely correct.
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April 18th, 2008 at 9:13 am
I was thinking more about this apparently in my sleep, because I woke up this morning and decided to check on Papi’s spring training numbers. His spring training average was .250, with no homers. Not good, not Papi-like, but not .120, either. (Plus, I’m never sure how much weight to give spring training numbers at all. I mean, Jason Varitek had 4 jacks this spring. Does that tell us anything at all? I’m not so sure.) I keep coming back to a sort of paradox. A ridiculously low BABIP, a lower HR/F percentage, and a slightly higher GB percentage could translate into hitting the ball a bit more weakly. And from watching Papi hit, it’s true that he’s not hitting absolute lasers out there. (On the other hand, Papi often hits moonshots instead of lasers…so take all of this with a grain of salt.) If the ball were coming off his bat with more velocity, maybe some of those balls that get caught in the outfield would fall in for hits. Maybe some of those grounders would be too hot for the fielders to handle. Then I start to think, well, maybe it is something wrong with his knee after all (since weakness in the legs could well correspond to weakness in hitting the ball). AND THEN I remember that last year, when we know he had a problem with his knee, he had a career-best .332 average, a career-high 52 doubles, and still cranked 35 dingers—not his 54 dingers of the previous year, but still better than respectable. Which gets me right back to where I started. So it could be possible, as Brian has argued, that there is simply no way to explain Papi’s slump at this time—not even bad luck. But I do think it’s sort of fun to try.
Suz, when I was speaking of mathspeak and Englishmajorspeak, I was referring to what you had said about my “what goes around comes around” comment, not the other bit. To me, “what goes around comes around” is essentially the same as “the Law of Large Numbers says that as Papi has more and more at-bats, his batting average and BABIP will approach their “true” theoretical values.” Or, if not the same, then close enough for government work.
Lyndsay, interesting that you mentioned JD Poo. Apparently, a lot of Poo’s trouble’s last year came about because of David Ortiz! David is the previous LHB in the lineup, and you know how he likes to really dig in to the batter’s box? Well, Poo was coming up to the plate and stepping into Papi’s trough. Poo usually would stand much further back from the dish than Papi, however, so it ended up really messing with his swing. Once the team/Poo figured this out, Poo started hitting again. Too bad it took them most of the season! (Note: if Poo keeps hitting like he is now, I may have to stop calling him Poo.)
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April 18th, 2008 at 9:28 am
I am addicted and cannot stop.
I was just looking over David’s splits. Here are two notes of interest to total baseball nerds (nnngaaahhh!):
1) On full counts, Ortiz has no hits. He has 5 walks and 4 strikeouts. Right now, he also has a just-barely-career-high 4.21 pitches-per-plate-appearance. This is already down a bit from the last time I looked (on Monday) when I think it was a whopping 4.45. Intriguing.
2) Even when he sucks, he’s still clutch! (Tongue in cheek. I know clutch does not really exist, probably. Please do not hurt me with math.) Behold the following splits (AVG/OBP):
None on: .071/.161
Runners on: .143/.268
Runners in scoring position: .176/.333
Even when he’s doing shittily, he’s still twice as good with runners in scoring position! (Maybe “twice as good” isn’t the phrase we want here. Maybe “half as crappy” would be more accurate.)
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April 18th, 2008 at 10:48 am
so…we have traded a good David Ortiz and a bad J.D. Drew for the other way around? and the team covered for it by saying it was JD’s kid’s health issues? interesting.
Ortiz’s slump aint affected Manny though (contrary to the theory that when one suffers, they both suffer)…he seems more determined than ever to hit “for” Ortiz, which is awwwwww so sweet.
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April 18th, 2008 at 10:58 am
Well, I’m sure JD was really worried about his son, too. But it def. didn’t help that he was totally out of whack in the batter’s box.
Maybe Ortiz should just join Manny at API next winter!
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April 18th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
You’re telling me that after 10 years in the big leagues, J.D. Drew didn’t know where to stand in the batter’s box? The Red Sox are the kings of excuses.
@Nick - “…but we have mountains of evidence that bad knees or any other human factors simply can’t drop your BABIP that low.” Is this actually true? I’ve always heard that BABIP was more accurate at predicting a pitcher’s luck than being totally indicative of a hitters’ luck.
Consider for a second that there is something wrong with David Ortiz. Say his knee is acting up and it’s worse than last season. He’s not striking out more but he’s pulling off the ball. Wouldn’t that drastically lower his BABIP?
This is what they say happened to Bobby Abreu in April/May last season. I don’t know if I necessarily agree with it but it’s something to think about.
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April 19th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
Mo Vaughn’s 2002 Babip was .314
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April 19th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
Mo Vaughn’s BABIP
1991 0.301
1992 0.252
1993 0.339
1994 0.372
1995 0.345
1996 0.366
1997 0.384
1998 0.386
1999 0.311
2000 0.326
2002 0.314
2003 0.218
He didn’t get less lucky as his career went on. He was falling apart
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April 19th, 2008 at 11:16 pm
Brian, in 2003, Mo Vaughn started 25 games. Didn’t you tell me we couldn’t explain Papi’s slump—even as freakish bad luck—partly because the sample size was so small? And even in 2002 and 2000 and 1999, Mo’s BABIP is still better than average—it’s just not the monstrous one of the previous years. So yeah, you can say he was in decline in those years, but even “falling apart” seems harsh, just from looking at the numbers you’ve listed here. He was still hitting about thirty bombs a year and OBPing over .350 during those “decline” years. Even if we grant, for a moment, that Vaughn’s lower BABIP could be traced to the knee—which seems plausible enough to me—a BABIP of .218 is still much, much higher and much closer to the average than a BABIP of .063 (what Papi’s was when I started researching my piece). It seems like for a BABIP of .063 to be traced to a physical cause, it would have to be more than just a bum knee—Ortiz would have had to have amputated his entire leg!
But more importantly, the point you are arguing here about Vaughn seems to contradict the argument you’re making about Ortiz. You’re using a sample size of 25 games to prove that…you can’t tell what was ailing Ortiz over 14 games? I don’t follow.
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April 20th, 2008 at 2:57 am
Hey Nick!
The argument that this is just an unlucky slump makes a lot more sense, now that I know that BABIP rarely deviates far from .300. That is certainly a crucial part of the argument that was missing at least for me (maybe this is widely known among long-time baseball fans?)
But on the other hand, Sarah named several players with BABIPs in the dumps. So maybe BABIPs significantly different than 30% isn’t as freakish as you suggest. I know 67 is a small *percentage* of total season at-bats, and what happens early in the season may not have any bearings on numbers later into the summer. But statistically, it’s a large enough sample size to observe a real effect in Papi’s batting average. This is where I think you and I differ, Sare– I think until he fixes whatever he needs to fix, he really is a .117 hitter. You’re saying that number isn’t reflective of his current “true” skill, but of his bad luck. I guess I side with the rest of Boston, which definitely means you’re right. :)
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April 20th, 2008 at 6:35 am
I’m not saying that it is impossible for Ortiz to have an injury right now. All I’m saying is that it is impossible for an injury to drop his BABIP so freakishly low, meaning that an injury simply cannot account for all of his apparent sucktitude, leaving bad luck as the only explanation for the majority of it.
While an injury *can* affect your BABIP if you are hitting the ball but hitting it weakly or something, as Brian alludes to. But in those cases, it is going to drop your BABIP down to .260 or something, not all the way down to .063.
Statistically, an .063 BABIP is simply not sustainable over an extended period of time. That’s why Brian’s example of Mo Vaughn is not relevant, because it was such a small sample size. As the sample size increases, it becomes increasingly more difficult to have an extremely low or extremely high BABIP, and results increasingly cluster in the .290 to .310 range.
If Brian can find a player who ever BABIP’d .218 over 550 at-bats, I would be pretty surprised.
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April 20th, 2008 at 10:55 am
Nick,
Dave Kingman had BABIPs of .204 in 1986 (561 at-bats) and .207 in 1982 (535 at-bats).
Rob Deer was close in 1991, but only had about 450 at-bats and a .220 BABIP.
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April 20th, 2008 at 11:04 am
Update: Since I wrote this column, David has definitely become more Papi-like, knocking in 7 RBI in the last week (for 10 on the season). His BABIP over the last seven days has been .261, and his average (.141) is nearly double what it was last weekend, when I decided to write about this…
Tangent: I went to last night’s Sox game, and it was so heartwarming to see Papi drive in the tying run and then see Manny hit the go-ahead homer! It was a real no-doubter, too: from the moment the ball left his bat, there was never a question that it was outtah heah. (TATTOOOOOED!) Fenway went crazy. Then Papelbon came in to get the save! A deeply satisfying conclusion.
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April 20th, 2008 at 11:49 am
Theres more to it than just BABIP. The composition of the balls in play makes a huge difference. You can’t count a line drive to the center fielder hit on the nose the same as a weak grounder to the second baseman. If you look a little further into it, you’ll see Ortiz’s line drive percentage is way down too. Grounders and flyballs result in hits sometimes, but not nearly as frequently as line drives. Line drives are where the hits are.
Right now Ortiz has hit line drives 10% of the time. Since 2004, he has never been below 16.2% (for a season) and he has been as high as 22%.
So, BABIP is part of the problem, but the larger problem is simply that Ortiz hasn’t hit the ball well (regardless of what Magadan says). He’s striking out more than he usually is and he’s not hitting the ball hard, at people or not. Thats it in a nutshell.
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April 20th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
mattymatty, what you say is of course correct, in general, but aren’t we still working with a pretty minute sample size here to be saying that Ortiz is not hitting enough line drives. I mean, he only has 71 at bats, and once you whittle that down even further to just the balls in play, the difference between 10% line-drives and 16% line drives is going to be what? something like 2 line drives?
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April 20th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
Nick - you are correct. Obviously there is a sample size issue in addition to my comments above, but I didn’t address that because it was addressed previously by other commenters.
As for the specifics, Ortiz has (through yesterday’s game) come to the plate 81 times. If he had a line drive percentage of say 17% (what he had last season) then he would have roughly 6 more line drives, or about 4.5 more hits.
So, yeah, his low BABIP is a function partly of luck, partly line drive percentage, and partly a sample size issue.
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April 20th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
Can we be clear on one thing? I’m using Mo Vaughn as an example for two reasons:
1) He’s a known case that we can work backwards from. We know that his knee issues affected his play later in his career. So we can look at his stats and see a pattern for that kind of hitter.
2) He’s very similar to David Ortiz.
If we’re going to argue small sample size here then there can’t be a double standard. If I can’t include Mo Vaugn’s 79 ABs in a list of his BABIP, then Sarah can’t write an article analyzing a player’s BABIP in mid-April. We can’t have it both ways.
My general point is that people misuse BABIP as an end-all-be-all stat. Under-290=Unlucky Over-300=Lucky. Clearly not. If injury is a possibility, you have to look at that too.
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April 20th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
Brian, I’m not following your argument, here. You said that Mo’s BABIP dropped because of the knee. But the only late-career below-average BABIP I see here is this 25-game streak at the end. Yeah, his knee was bad then. But a low BABIP over 25 games doesn’t necessarily have any kind of causal relationship with a bad knee. I’m not sure we can “work backwards” from that example.
My argument is that Papi’s crappy BABIP is a fluke due to small sample size. So on my end, the small sample size is actually working *with* my argument, not against it. You say that people misuse BABIP as a be-all-end-all stat, but I don’t think anyone has done that in this particular discussion. We’ve talked about GB%, LD%, K rate, BB rate, IF/F%….
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April 20th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
You’ve thrown out the examples of GB% and LD% due to small sample size.
The BABIP in Mo Vaughn’s last four years (when his knee was becoming a serious problem) is a lot lower than in his prime.
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April 20th, 2008 at 7:47 pm
Brian, yes, but that lower BABIP is still higher than the mean. Vaughn was still productive—extremely productive. I just don’t see how it relates to the case of David Ortiz’s current slump at all. Sorry, I just completely disagree that Mo Vaughn is relevant here.
My point about the other stats is that we actually *have* looked at them. You might disagree with my conclusions, but your characterization of my methods is inaccurate—I certainly didn’t go into this looking only at David’s BABIP. I looked at a lot of other numbers, and the only number that looked like a preposterous outlier was, yes, his batting average on balls in play. Just because I ultimately decided those other numbers were enough within the norm that they alone couldn’t account for a sub-.100 batting average doesn’t mean I didn’t give them a careful evaluation. I didn’t throw them out because of small sample size—I threw them out because considering that the sample size is so small, a slightly higher GB% translates to a scant handful of batted balls.
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April 21st, 2008 at 1:52 am
Vaughn went from an elite hitter to a better-than-average hitter. Not “extremely productive.”
You can’t throw away a “scant” four ground balls when he’d only had 49 balls in play at that point. That’s over 8% of his BIP.
How about the fact that 57% of his balls in play hadn’t even left the infield? Does that account for anything?
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April 21st, 2008 at 9:57 am
That last stat is interesting. Do you know how many of those went into the shift? How does that percentage compare to his career norms? Just from watching, it seems like he’s been able to go to the opposite field a little more this past week.
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April 21st, 2008 at 12:29 pm
Career norms are 38%INF/62%OUT
I don’t know whether he has been hitting into the shift or not.
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April 25th, 2008 at 3:34 pm
Brian, in case you missed it, your nice little animated gif got a shoutout on the best Red Sox blog on the interwebs (Center Field).
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April 26th, 2008 at 4:33 pm
I think the BABIP argument is being overstated in these comments. “BABIP rarely deviates far from .300″ is true for pitchers. It bounces around as a reflection of luck and no pitcher can control it from one year to the next. But good hitters (especially line drive hitters) do have an ability to sustain conistently higher BABIP’s. Just look at Ichiro Suzuki:
http://www.fangraphs.com/graphs.aspx?playerid=1101&position=OF&page=7&type=full
Who has never been below .300 in his life and was at almost .400 last year, as compared to, say, John McDonald (the worst hitter I can think of, being from Toronto):
http://www.fangraphs.com/graphs.aspx?playerid=395&position=3BSS&page=7&type=full
It’s true that the league average BABIP is consistent from one year to the next, but that’s like saying that the league AVG is consistent. It doesn’t mean that nobody has the ability to be consistently better or worse.
Of course that’s true within reason. Something as way off as a BABIP of 0.063 is certainly a sign of at least some bad luck (as is going 4-43 if you’re not legally blind).
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