I love hearing about BABIP, but the point people are trying to make isn’t “Wright has been extremely lucky,” but instead “Wright needs to strike out less so he’ll get more hits because his BABIP is so high.”

That is Cerronian logic.

Did Shpigel really need to consult Elias to find Wright’s BABIP?

But it’s really scary when Jerry is right about something baseball related and other people are wrong.

I think it will regress, but not as much as is thought. The home park has more open space in the OF. More space should lead to more balls falling in than would be anticipated with his LD%.

With that said, no one has BABIP’ed over .400 at any time since 2004 (and possibly further back, but THT’s stats only go back so far).

I am still expecting the power to come to make up for the inevitable loss in batting average, but I am at least concerned by it.

Don’t you think the upper echelon hitters, when they get a ball they can handle, can pretty much hit the ball in a hole. For example, Wright has a ton of hits in between short and third. I mean, a ton. This would seem to indicate that a BABIP is not just random chance at all. If a player knows how to take a certain pitch to a hole (not all the time obviously, but sometimes), then it stands to reason that this player will always have a decent BABIP.

What I’m saying is, it’s not random chance where a guy hits the ball. As a weak example, say you’re playing slow pitch softball or wiffleball. It’s fairly easy to direct the ball a certain way, and hit a hole. While I get that major league players are dealing with a much harder challenge, couldn’t a very good hitter get to a level where they are locked in and hit the ball certain areas? Tony Gwynn and Wade Boggs made a career out of this (yes, I get that they struck out very few times). So while his BABIP is kind of ridiculous at .467 and will come down, he could still maintain a very good average on it.

Also, sometimes guys can have a lucky season for an entire year. It does happen. It’s called a career year. Maybe this is David’s “career year” from a batting average standpoint and he hits .330 to .340 with 140 Ks. Stranger things have happened in this game. Like Omir Santos becoming a borderline .300 hitter.

Was just checking baseball-reference.com for a similar “lucky” season. Look at Dave Winfield’s. He hit .340 with 71 Ks in 593 ABs (okay Wright’s on pace for double that, but still a fair amount of Ks for a .340 hitter). Subtract the K’s and Winfield has a near .400 BABIP. He also only hit 19 homers that year. Factoring in the added K’s, Wright would need to “get lucky” about 20 to 25 more times than Winfield did that year. Playing at Citi, I don’t think that’s impossible.

One more example:
Paul O’Neill hit .359 in 103 games out of no where in 1994. It was that crazy strike shortened offensive year in MLB. He struck out 56 times in 368 ABs, so his BABIP was well over .400. He was only a career .288 hitter, but this was his career year for avg. These were just 2 examples I thought of quickly, I’m sure there are many others.

Don’t underestimate the career/lucky year phenomenon. It happens. To paraphrase Bull Durham, all it takes is one extra bleeder, blooper or chopper a week during a 162 game season to turn a .250 hitter into a .300 hitter. Maybe Wright’s getting lucky and going from .310 to .340. Don’t fret over it, just enjoy the ride.

I fully understand what BABIP is. Yes, the .359 was the batting avg. I didn’t feel like doing the actual math, but I gave you the necessary numbers and O’Neil’s BABIP was obviously over .400 (he hit 21 HRs if I didn’t mention that).

Kendy are you saying that career .250 to .260 hitters cannot get a little lucky and hit .300 for a year? That Durham speech has some truth to it. He was talking about how if a guy comes up and gets lucky for a season, he can parlay that into a few years in the bigs. That does happen. It’s happening for Santos right now.

Almost every player that plays about 10 to 12 years will have a flukey season at some point, whether it’s good flukey or bad flukey. Following that logic, career years for BABIP happen too, maybe you don’t get that, or are just in love with numbers a little too much. For example, you’d have probably said in May or June of 1994 (or in Winfield’s case, June of ‘84) that their BABIP and their BA almost absolutely had to come down. But it didn’t and you’d have been wrong.

and a good discussion. Not too much to add but wanted to say thanks — what started out as a roundup of dumb media claims about BABIP (“claim chowder”) turned into a nice little talk about Wright’s weird season.

Thought you were being sarcastic saying the Durham speech wasn’t really good, gotcha.