beltrans_boy wrote: Well, the BABIP is luck. There's no way around that.
prove it. On the HT site they don't even have BABIP for 2004. I have never seen it used as a metric to evaluate hitters. i'll be happy to read whatever you can find.
beltrans_boy wrote: Well, the BABIP is luck. There's no way around that.
prove it. On the HT site they don't even have BABIP for 2004. I have never seen it used as a metric to evaluate hitters. i'll be happy to read whatever you can find.
It's not easy to prove either way without crunching a whole lot of numbers, which I'm not prepared to do right now . BABIP for hitters isn't luck in the same sense that it is for pitchers; for pitchers, it's generally around .300 for every single pitcher (knuckleballers are slightly different). For hitters, it varies from hitter to hitter, but is generally pretty stable (luck notwithstanding) throughout a player's career. It's not impossible for a player's BABIP to make a permanent jump (Melvin Mora is an example of this), but if you're playing the percentages, you've got to expect it to return somewhere close to career averages.
Hmmm, you're right, they don't. That surprises me, ESPN usually has some pretty nice statistics.
reiser wrote:
beltrans_boy wrote: Well, the BABIP is luck. There's no way around that.
reiser wrote:prove it. On the HT site they don't even have BABIP for 2004. I have never seen it used as a metric to evaluate hitters. i'll be happy to read whatever you can find.
While there is a ton of fluctuation in BABIP from hitter to hitter, it's worth noting that Lee's BABIP last year was .306. His BABIP in 2003 was .301, do you notice the trend? Unless he's found a way to increase that number by over 30% (doubtful), you can expect it to come back down to earth. It's also worth noting that his career BABIP is .314 (and that includes this years inflated numbers).
Will every hitter regress to a .300 BABIP? No. There are too many different factors that go into it. You have to look at the patterns of production year in and year out for each individual hitter. Lee has never demonstrated that he can have a BABIP that is significantly over .300, and I don't see any reason to believe that that he'll be able to maintain a number that is 125 points above his career average. Maybe I'm just a cynic, but I think he's bound to fall off...
[size=10]"Men are apt to mistake the strength of their feeling for the strength of their argument." [/size]
reiser wrote: prove it. On the HT site they don't even have BABIP for 2004. I have never seen it used as a metric to evaluate hitters. i'll be happy to read whatever you can find.
It's not easy to prove either way without crunching a whole lot of numbers, which I'm not prepared to do right now . BABIP for hitters isn't luck in the same sense that it is for pitchers...
reiser wrote: prove it. On the HT site they don't even have BABIP for 2004. I have never seen it used as a metric to evaluate hitters. i'll be happy to read whatever you can find.
It's not easy to prove either way without crunching a whole lot of numbers, which I'm not prepared to do right now . BABIP for hitters isn't luck in the same sense that it is for pitchers...
Right-the only study I saw was 2004 only.
Well, THT only has BABIP for 2004 and 2005. For the other years, you have to calculate it yourself. SF and SH stats can be found on the MLB.com player profiles. Once you have those numbers, it's a fairly simple calculation.
[size=10]"Men are apt to mistake the strength of their feeling for the strength of their argument." [/size]
beltrans_boy wrote: While there is a ton of fluctuation in BABIP from hitter to hitter, it's worth noting that Lee's BABIP last year was .306. His BABIP in 2003 was .301, do you notice the trend? Unless he's found a way to increase that number by over 30% (doubtful), you can expect it to come back down to earth. It's also worth noting that his career BABIP is .314 (and that includes this years inflated numbers).
so can you defend BABIP in evaluating hitters or not? if not, why not just stick to OBP?
your point is certainly taken, and i'm not going to argue that Lee is going to hit .400, or even .375. but at this point he could hit .300 the rest of the way and finish where? .320?
beltrans_boy wrote: While there is a ton of fluctuation in BABIP from hitter to hitter, it's worth noting that Lee's BABIP last year was .306. His BABIP in 2003 was .301, do you notice the trend? Unless he's found a way to increase that number by over 30% (doubtful), you can expect it to come back down to earth. It's also worth noting that his career BABIP is .314 (and that includes this years inflated numbers).
so can you defend BABIP in evaluating hitters or not? if not, why not just stick to OBP?
your point is certainly taken, and i'm not going to argue that Lee is going to hit .400, or even .375. but at this point he could hit .300 the rest of the way and finish where? .320?
I think those are numbers that we should expect from here on out. It's these guys calling him a Triple Crown lock, and that since he's a "second half player" that he's going to bat .400 in the second half that give me headaches
beltrans_boy wrote: While there is a ton of fluctuation in BABIP from hitter to hitter, it's worth noting that Lee's BABIP last year was .306. His BABIP in 2003 was .301, do you notice the trend? Unless he's found a way to increase that number by over 30% (doubtful), you can expect it to come back down to earth. It's also worth noting that his career BABIP is .314 (and that includes this years inflated numbers).
so can you defend BABIP in evaluating hitters or not? if not, why not just stick to OBP?
It's less reliable than using it to evaluate pitchers, but it's still useful. Like I said, BABIP fluctuates quite a bit from player to player, but when you look at a player's career numbers, you can get a general idea about what kind of numbers you can expect going forward. That's all I'm doing here. Doing a side-by-side comparison with Lee's career numbers and his 2005 numbers makes me think that he's getting extremely lucky.
It's also worth noting that no player has ever had a BABIP of .432 over a complete season. Ichiro's ~.400 BABIP mark in 2004 was one of the luckiest in the history of baseball.
reiser wrote:your point is certainly taken, and i'm not going to argue that Lee is going to hit .400, or even .375. but at this point he could hit .300 the rest of the way and finish where? .320?
Well, we're not that far apart then. I'm arguing that Lee is going to hit around .280-.290 the rest of the way, and you're arguing that he'll hit .300. He'll finish around .320, and those are very respectable numbers, but all fantasy owners should care about are the numbers that he's going to put up going forward. Accumulated stats mean nothing to fantasy owners, but they do bump up his percieved trading value.
If he's going to hit .300 from now until the end of the season, then he should be valued as a .300 hitter and not a .320 hitter because that's the amount of production that he's going to give you going forward. That's all I'm saying. Don't let his first half numbers fool you into thinking this guy is Albert Pujols, cause he's doing it with smoke and mirrors (for the most part).
[size=10]"Men are apt to mistake the strength of their feeling for the strength of their argument." [/size]
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by MFTIOA » Tue Jun 21, 2005 7:00 pm 
. BABIP for hitters isn't luck in the same sense that it is for pitchers; for pitchers, it's generally around .300 for every single pitcher (knuckleballers are slightly different). For hitters, it varies from hitter to hitter, but is generally pretty stable (luck notwithstanding) throughout a player's career. It's not impossible for a player's BABIP to make a permanent jump (Melvin Mora is an example of this), but if you're playing the percentages, you've got to expect it to return somewhere close to career averages.
