FanPost

Yet another take on Wright's BABIP

(bumped from the fanposts. --eric)

Much ink has been spilled over David Wright's BABIP this season, but yesterday I read an interesting comment on Fangraphs about how line drive % plus .120 was not a good estimator of BABIP, linking to a study done at the Hardball Times.

The basic results of that study are that xBABIP is a much better estimator that ldBABIP (LD% + .120). In fact, the R-Squared on xBABIP was 0.25, but 0.04(!) on ldBABIP. qxBABIP, the quick and dirty version of xBABIP is also a much better estimator than ldBABIP. Since the study was conducted in January, the folks at the HBT have further tuned and made available a spreadsheet to calculate a simple xBABIP.

Curious about how David Wright's real BABIP stacks up against his simple xBABIP I plugged in the numbers courtesy of Fangraphs:


Actual BABIP = .430
xBABIP = .326
LD% + .120 = .364

This suggests Wright's been even more lucky that suggested by the LD formula.

Here's how his xBABIP stacks up year by year:
Year BABIP xBABIP ldBABIP

BABIP -

xBABIP

BABIP -

ldBABIP

2005 .340 .318 .376 .022 -.036
2006 .344 .311 .315 .033 .029
2007 .356 .341 .352 .015 .004
2008 .321 .314 .376 .007 -.055
2009 .430 .326 .364 .104 .066

(BABIP and xBABIP numbers I pulled from the HBT spreadsheet, others are from Fangraphs. Note there's a slight discrepancy between the reported BABIP in the spreadsheet and Fangraphs' BABIP.)

Wright appears to consistently outperform his xBABIP, although that tendency has been trending down in recent years. I'd be hard pressed to even call xBABIP a better estimator of BABIP over his career than LD% + .120.

Just for fun, here's Beltran since he's been a Met:

Year BABIP xBABIP ldBABIP
2005 .292 .276 .312
2006 .263 .300 .288
2007 .286 .304 .310
2008 .297 .319 .341
2009 .367 .303 .322

This FanPost was contributed by a member of the community and was not subject to any vetting or approval process.