Statistics in a sample size as small as the season to date can be strongly influenced by pure, dumb luck. That’s why Justin Masterson suddenly looks like a Cy Young candidate this year while his peripherals have stayed fairly constant, and why Fausto Carmona’s numbers are worse despite making improvements in both his strikeout and walk rates.
It’s also why Travis Hafner seems to have turned back the clock with his explosive hitting.
Heading into last night’s game, Hafner, 33, owned a sterling .342/.400/.566 slashline, good for a .966 OPS and a .412 wOBA. His 167 wRC+ is the best he’s had since 2006.
The problem is, his stat sheet also features a phenomenal .407 batting average on balls in play. BABIP, also known as hit rate, is exactly what it sounds like: the proportion of balls a batter hits inside the field of play that fall for hits. While hitters have some control over their hit rates (fast and powerful guys tend to do better than slow-footed players with little pop), major fluctuations from the league average (around .300) are usually the result of luck.
To put Hafner’s .407 BABIP in perspective, it would have ranked fourth in the American League before Wednesday’s game if he had enough plate appearances to qualify. Last year’s BABIP leader was Austin Jackson at .396, and no one has maintained a hit rate over .400 since Jose Hernandez in 2002.
No one has posted a BABIP as high as Hafner’s in my lifetime—the last guy to do it was Rod Carew (.408) in 1977. A .407 hit rate would be the ninth-best single-season mark in baseball history. To conclude that this is due to anything other than luck is hard to fathom; say what you want about how hard he’s hitting the ball, but Hafner is not making the ninth-best contact in MLB history.
How are we to tell how much luck is involved? Using The Hardball Times’ fantastically amazing xBABIP calculator, we can get an estimate of what a player’s hit rate would be under normal circumstances. By plugging his expected hit rate in for his actual BABIP, we can get an idea of how Hafner would do in a neutral context.
Hafner’s xBABIP for his pre-ankle injury season comes out at .321. Substituting that for his .407 actual BABIP and using his Power Factor to calculate slugging, his slashline falls to .276/.334/.457, for a .789 OPS. That’s not bad by any stretch, but it’s certainly not optimal for a DH. And it would be hard to call this season a renaissance for Pronk when he would have his worst OPS since 2008.
Those who would dismiss this discrepancy would say that Hafner is hitting the ball harder than the numbers can measure, but that criticism does not hold water considering that Hafner’s power and batted-ball types are accounted for in xBABIP (that’s why it’s .321 instead of .300).
Consider also the names ahead of Hafner on the BABIP leaderboards: Wilson Betemit (.441), Matt Joyce (.433), and Peter Bourjos (.408). Are those guys really tearing the cover off the ball? If they’re getting lucky, why should we not assume the same as Hafner?
Want more evidence that Hafner is playing over his head? In 2006, when Pronk had an insane 176 wRC+ and was an MVP candidate even though he missed the entire last month of the season, his BABIP was .323—or, almost exactly what his xBABIP is now. So saying he’s hitting the ball as well as he ever has means his hit rate is still 80-some points too high.
In all likelihood, Hafner will see a big regression in the coming weeks, and the ankle problem that cost him four games last week will likely be the scapegoat for his decline, either as the thing that broke his momentum or a lingering concern. But the real reason for his drop-off will be cold, unforgiving luck.
Original Story:
http://www.wahooblues.com/2011/05/05/...
