So since we last checked in, Padres first-sacker Adrian Gonzalez has continued mashing balls out of the park at a prodigous rate, and is currently on pace for 63 bombs this season despite playing half his games in the worst hitters park in the Majors.

But what is downright scary about Adrian Gonzalez’s 2009 campaign is that he has actually been unlucky this year on batted balls. His BABIP is only .246, well below his career mark of .312,  and seventh worst in the league, way down there with other down-on-their-luck hitters like Jimmy Rollins, Jay Bruce, and Garrett Atkins.

But whereas those other guys are all putting up pretty depressed stat lines due to their bad luck with BABIP, Gonzalez has an outstanding slash line of .281/.421/.638/1.059

It is amazing to ponder how crazy that line would look if Gonzalez were having even average luck this year on balls in play.

David Ortiz is off to yet another terrible start this year.  He had a terrible first month last season too, when he batted .198 with a .300 OBP and 5 homers in April, and is off to an even worse start this year, with an April batting average of .230, an OBP of .290, and zero homers.

It got so bad that manager Terry Francona actually sat down with Ortiz and told him that the team would not give up on him no matter how much he struggled: “Francona told him they were in it together, that he needed to relax, and that this team would succeed or fail with him.”

So what exactly is wrong with David Ortiz? Last season when he sucked it up in April, it was really just an illusion created by abnormally bad luck with BABIP, as Ortiz had a ridiculously low .192 BABIP in April 2008. But BABIP is definitely not the cause this time: Ortiz’s BABIP so far this year is a healthy .295

Injury doesn’t seem to be the culprit, either, as Ortiz seemed fine in spring training, when he posted a robust line of .313/.395/.625 with 3 homers in twelve games, and swears up and down that his wrist feels 100 percent.

Rather, the answer seems to be that Terry Francona is right, that Ortiz is pressing and needs to just “relax.”  The numbers show that Ortiz is swinging at many more at pitches outside the strike zone than usual (28% vs 18% career), and he is making more contact with pitches outside the zone (61% vs 48% career), meaning he is doing pitchers a big favor by “extending the zone” and also sacrificing power to make greater contact with bad balls.

In the case of both swings outside the zone and contact outside the zone, Ortiz’s numbers have been remarkably consistent over his career, with year-to-year swings confined to within a percentage point or two, so the numbers so far this year are quite anomalous.

The good news is that with this one exception of his plate discipline, Ortiz’s other peripherals all seem to be in perfect order. This means that Ortiz is probably not hurt or otherwise majorly broken. If he can get his plate discipline back in line and start “waiting for his pitch” a bit more, he should be fine.

Braves starter Javier Vazquez has always been a pretty decent pitcher, but this year he has really stepped up his game.  Before 2009, in his whole career Vazquez only had one season where he struck out more than a batter per inning, and that came back in 2003 when he was still with some team called the “Expos.”

But so far in five starts this year Vazquez is on an incredible pace of 12 K/9. If he were to keep that pace up all season long, he would wind up with a ridiculous 309 strikeouts.

How well is the new found ability to blow away the opposition translating stat-wise for Vazquez? Well, he is off to a pretty decent start, at 2-2 with a 3.38 ERA

But here’s the thing.  Vazquez is getting incredibly unlucky on the balls that do get put in play, yielding a brutally high .383 BABIP. His FIP (Fielding-Independent Pitching), which models what his ERA should be given league averages, is a miniscule 1.73.

So is Javy Vazquez secretly of to an unbelievably awesome start to the season, which is obscured only by some really bad luck on balls in play?  Has he really pitched well enough that he deserves to have a 1.73 ERA?

My answer is “No.”  I think this is a classic case of what I view as a serious problem with FIP and K/9 as stats, especially when they interact with a high BABIP.  The high BABIP means that batted balls which normally should be outs are dropping in for hits.  Which means that Vazquez is getting many, many more chances to get strikeouts per inning! If his BABIP were normal, some of those batted balls would be caught for non-strikeout outs, and Vazquez’s K/9 would be much lower.

At least as far as I understand it, this means that FIP is significantly underestimating what Vazquez’s ERA should be.  In fact, logic dicates that any pitcher getting unlucky with BABIP should have an elevated K/9.

Red Sox fans are already starting to panic about Josh Beckett. After a fine first start in which he allowed one run in 7 innings, he has gotten progressively worse, culminating in Thursday’s 13-0 whupping at the hands of the Rays in which Beckett allowed 7 earned runs in only 4.2 innings. His ERA now sits at a hefty 7.22.

But the good news is that there is nothing about Beckett’s peripherals to suggest that anything is out of the ordinary.  Aside from a slightly elevated walk rate, he looks like the same, near-ace level pitcher he has always been.  His groundball/flyball/line drive rates are all within career norms, his K/9 is a healthy 9.73 (career: 8.59), and his homer rate per 9 of 0.94 almost nails on the nose his career rate of 0.95.  Overall his FIP (fielding-independent pitching), which approximates what his ERA should be given league averages, is a mere 4.07.

The real culprit here is Beckett’s BABIP, which at .398 is the third worst in the Major Leagues, behind only Justin Verlander and Dana Eveland (both at .408).  In other words, Beckett has just had extremely bad luck with balls just happening to land where fielders weren’t.

Take a deep breath, he’ll be fine.

Don’t look now, but after all the hyping of the Yankees trio of young arms, 39-year-old Mike Mussina has become the most consistent and reliable starting pitcher on the Bombers staff. After tonight’s victory over Toronto, Mussina is now 9-4 and on pace to win 21 games this season. He also has a very respectable 4.01 ERA.

Which got me wondering about last year, when we all had the perception that Mussina was getting hammered and that he was basically done for his career. While it’s true that Mussina had an unsightly 5.15 ERA last season – the highest of his career – when I went back and looked, most of his other peripherals were decent. His walk rate remained miniscule, and his home run rate of 0.83 HR/9 was actually the lowest over a full season out of his whole 18 year career.

Which of course immediately made me think of BABIP.

Sure enough, last year Mike Mussina was victimized by the highest BABIP of his entire career, at .340. And it wasn’t even particularly close. The next worst BABIP mark of his career was only .326, which he posted in 1996 and matched in 2005. This year, Mussina’s BABIP has predictably fallen back down to .304, which is very much in line with league averages and his career rate of .298, which explains much of the apparent difference between this year and last year.

So while it is certainly true that Mussina is old and his strikeout rate has been in gradual decline, it is safe to conclude that Mussina didn’t really fall off a cliff last year as we all thought. It was mostly BABIP. Especially since he wasn’t giving up bombs at all, we can conclude that balls were just falling in for singles here and there, in a case of bad luck.

Batting average on balls in play, or BABIP, is a tool most useful for evaluating pitchers. While batters do show some ability to consistently hit for BABIP above or below league average from year to year, we have almost no evidence that pitchers can control the results of balls put into play against them from year to year. This means that as we approach the end of the first third of the current season, BABIP is useful to help fantasy team owners determine which pitchers are for real and which pitchers are flukes so far.

Looking at pitchers with extreme and utterly unsustainable BABIP stats (over .350 or under .250), we can easily identify 5 pitchers who are performing way above their level, and 5 pitchers who have actually pitched quite well but do not have the stats to show for it. As a fantasy team owner, you should look to trade high on the former, before they inevitably crash back down to earth, and you should look to buy low on the latter, before their luck evens out and their stats return to their actual level of performance.

Sell High – 5 Lowest BABIPs

The chart at right shows the 5 luckiest pitchers in baseball, BABIP-wise.

Shaun Marcum has looked like an ace this season, tossing some absolute gems, such as an 8-inning, 2-hit, 0-run performance against a powerful Indians lineup on May 12, and a near complete game against the even more powerful Rays on May 7. But looking at his ridiculous .194 BABIP tells us that he has actually been the luckiest pitcher in all of baseball, upon which the difference between his 2.64 ERA this season and his 4.24 career ERA prior to this season becomes much more understandable. He’s not worth keeping – trade him if you can.

With a 5-3 record and a sparkling 3.22 ERA this season, Gavin Floyd has White Sox Fans thinking that he is finally blossoming into the ace everyone has long hoped he could become, but his gift-from-the-baseball-gods .198 BABIP suggests that he is actually much closer to the pitcher of prior years who had a career ERA in the high 5’s. Maybe a White Sox fan will bite on him.

Scott Olson has teamed up with Mark Hendrickson to be one of the co-aces of a surprising Marlins team, but Hendrickson has actually been the much better pitcher; Olson’s low BABIP portends an imminent return to mediocrity. Maybe you can get something for him before he crashes and burns.

After a several-year hiatus in the bullpen, Ryan Dempster has made a triumphant return to starting pitching, posting an astonishing 2.56 ERA in 11 starts. But his crazy low BABIP will soon regress, showing Cubs fans why he is just as mediocre a pitcher as he as always been. Sell him off to a Cubs fan now.

Joe Saunders is young and good, but he is not that young, and he is not this good. He’s definitely worth keeping on your team, but lower your expectations the rest of the way. His ERA will probably be in the mid 4’s from here on out.

Buy Low – Guys Who Have Been Unlucky

Here are the five pitchers who have been most snake bitten so far – bloopers falling in or slow rollers finding holes.

Andrew Miller of the Marlins has actually pitched very well this year, but nobody knows it because he has been the unluckiest pitcher in the game so far. He is probably not even owned in your league, so if you need a pitcher, go pick him up. He should give you decent strikeouts, and with that offense and in that park, decent ERA and wins as well the rest of the way.

Bronson Arroyo is another guy who is probably not even owned in your league. But don’t be fooled by his unsightly ERA and WHIP – he is pitching just as well as he did the past two seasons, when he put up near-ace-like numbers.

Ian Snell of the Pirates broke out last year with a strong ace-like season. This year the breakout secretly continues, hidden behind some horrible bad luck. He’s still good, and should be in your fantasy rotation if you can get him.

Ubaldo Jimenez is not as bad as his numbers have shown, but he pitches half his games in Coors Field, and half of the Rockies offense is on the DL right now, so I’d avoid him.

Miguel Batista is still the same old mediocre 4th starter type he’s always been. He’ll turn it around a bit when his luck evens out, but is probably not worth owning except in AL-only leagues, especially with that terrible Mariners defense behind him.

Other guys with low BABIP (Sell, sell, sell!): Daniel Cabrera, Todd Wellemeyer, Tim Redding, Jose Contreras

Other guys with high BABIP (Buy, buy, buy!): CC Sabathia, Andy Pettite, AJ Burnett, Manny Parra

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:[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/NRIknrEwkVw" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

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.

I’m a big believer in the utility of batting average on balls put in play, or BA/BIP, as a means of determining which players are likely to improve or decline over the rest of the season. The theory is that pitchers can only consistently control four things – home runs allowed, walks allowed, strikeouts recorded, and ground ball to flyball ratio. These four statistics show a strong correlation from year to year.

While pitchers can control the number of balls that are put into play (by striking out a lot of guys, or not), what pitchers cannot control is the batting average they allow on balls that are put into play. Similarly, hitters can only control how often they put the ball into play (by not striking out), as well as how many homers, walks, and flyballs vs. groundballs they hit, but not the batting average on those balls they put into play.

This makes sense intuitively, as we often suggest that it was not a pitcher’s fault if ground balls happen to find holes or little flares happen to drop in, just as we sympathize with a hitter who hits laser beams but they just happen to be hit right at a fielder.

Thus using BA/BIP, we can quickly decide which players have been extraordinarily lucky or unlucky with balls falling in or happening to be hit straight at someone. This was how we could tell last year that even though Andre Ethier was leading all major leaguers with a .393 batting average last July, he was not exactly the second coming of Ted Williams, because his batting average on balls put into play was the second best in baseball at the time, which suggested that he was getting extraordinarily luckly with balls dropping in for hits.

Conversely, if a player is doing extremely well or extremely poorly but his BA/BIP is not extra ordinarily high or low, we can assume that he is actually just that good or just that bad.

Looking at some of this year’s performances so far, we can see that Daisuke Matsuzaka has been extremely unlucky. Not only did he come into last night’s game with his team putting up a league low 1.2 runs of support behind him, but he also is in the bottom 10 pitchers in the batting average on balls put in play against him, yielding a .333 average any time an opponent doesn’t strikeout or hit a home run (.290 is about average). It is fortunate that Daisuke gets as many strikeouts as he does or his bad luck so far would have translated into an extremely high ERA.

Similarly, looking at batters, we can see that Gary Sheffield (currently batting .119) is very likely to improve in the near future as he has a second-worst in-the-AL .140 batting average on balls put into play, whereas BJ Upton (.340 avg)  has been extremely lucky, with a staggering, major-league-leading BA/BIP of .536, which means his performance is very likely to decline in the near future.