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How lucky can one guy get?

by Jonathan Halket
June 04, 2009



If you have a question for the Roster Doctor email here. Emails in simple text with players' full names properly spelled are much more likely to get responses. Also be sure to include your league's player pool (mixed, AL-only, NL-only), number of teams, scoring format (roto, head-to-head, points, etc.), categories, whether or not it's a keeper league, and any other pertinent information.

Comments

Mike said...

I thought it was the case that all batters tend to regress to their own historic BABIPs as the season goeas along.

For example, we wouldnt expect Ichiro’s BABIP to regress from .366 to the league average (.300), because it is in line with his career BABIP of .357 (over 5600 career ABs).

Is that right?

Posted 06/04  at  07:03 AM
Mark said...

What are your thoughts (or data) on
A. Hard Hit Balls
B. Ichiro (and others) ability to place the ball
Ichiro seems to hit the ball like a softball player.  He tries to “hit it where they aren’t”

Posted 06/04  at  12:00 PM
J.R. said...

Maybe Ichiro’s just been really, really lucky for a really, really long time. Or maybe the statement that “Equally well known is that players’ skills have little impact on their BABIP” is simply not true. I think I’ll go with the latter.

Posted 06/04  at  02:41 PM
Toffer Peak said...

“Equally well known is that players’ skills have little impact on their BABIP; once the batter puts the ball in play (home runs don’t count), whether or not the ball goes for a hit has little to do with the name on the back of the batter’s jersey.”

That is well known as true for pitchers. However that is well known as false for batters.

Posted 06/04  at  03:29 PM
John Burnson said...

Mike: A batter’s BABIP tends to regress toward his “true” BABIP (which is probably higher or lower than .300). A batter’s recent historic BABIP sheds light on his true BABIP, but because of noise, we can’t pin down the rate perfectly. Certainly, for a batter with Ichiro’s career AB, we have a better idea of his “true” BABIP than we do for less prolific batters.

Like you, I would not expect Ichiro’s BABIP to regress to .300, and no sound projection system would, either.

Posted 06/04  at  03:48 PM
Mike said...

Thanks for the response, John.

What would be a reasonable AB cutoff for a player to approximate hit true BABIP? 1,000 ABs? 2,000 ABs?

Posted 06/04  at  04:05 PM
John Burnson said...

Mike- Well, you can always obtain a “best guess”; what more AB gives is less dilution. With Marcels, for example, you add 1200 PA of league-average stats to the player’s weighted 3-year history. Even for someone with Ichiro’s massive playing time (2,200 raw PA from 2006-08; 8,800 weighted PA), league-average stats represent about 12% of his expected numbers. For someone with 200 PA/year, the proportion is 33%.

If you wanted no more than 20% dilution, then you’d need 400 PA/year (more or less). Etc.

Posted 06/04  at  05:00 PM
Jeff said...

If you interpret this exercise as a way of showing that a batter’s BABIP does not tend to stabilize at its expected value very quickly, then I guess it has merit (assuming a binomial distribution is most appropriate, which is doubtful).  A batter’s expected BABIP is likely best modeled using the player’s historical BABIP and deviations from his historical LD%, GB/FB, etc . . .

Posted 06/07  at  10:19 AM
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