Just a plain eye view of Aviles seems to be that he hits alot of balls up the middle. He legged out quite a few infield singles (seemed like more than others on the team). Maybe I’m wrong but it seemed like Aviles was doing that. Also his bat control seemed to be taking advantage of defensive alignment slicing a lot of singles between 1st and 2bagger when DDJ was on base.

After reading Mellinger’s blog regarding BABIP and the subsequent postings in RR, I have felt compelled to provide a layman’s perspective on the situation.

I believe that Sam is having trouble with the use of “luck” as a part of BABIP and using “luck” to describe a player’s past performance and to some extend I can see his point. Take Aviles as an example, yes, his BABIP for 2008 was high and it is more than likely to regress back to the mean. But does that mean that Aviles was lucky in 2008? How can we say that a person is lucky over a period of 400+ at bats? What I would say is that his BABIP is an indicator that he had a higher percentage of batted balls that became hits when compared to the league average. In all likelihood, his BABIP will not be as high this year and his overall offensive stats will show that.

Mellinger’s research is essentially useless, shouldn’t better players (over the long term) have better BABIP when compared to the league? BABIP is very useful for highlighting possible outliers or anamolies that have occurred (Bannister) and explaining why a player’s performance may have dropped from a previous year. What Sam needs to research (as many of you have done) are the “one-hit wonders” who may have had an outstanding season and then subsequently fell from grace.

I am not a huge stats guy, however, I see the benefit of BABIP and I am not encouraged when a writer downplays its usefulness to such a wide audience. The impact on the “average” fan, who does not have as much in-depth knowledge of advanced metrics, could be detrimental to those who are trying to gain footholds with a broader base. To this I say shame on you Sam Mellinger, shame on you.

I’m not comfortable with line drives as the only indicator of balls that are more likely to become base hits. As someone said earlier, you have speed. And you also have hard-hit grounders (of course that might cut both ways, a harder-hit grounder right to the third baseman might actually increase your chances of making an out). But on the whole, I’d like to see a study of how often harder-hit grounders become base hits (we would have to both define and measure hh grounders or "scorchers"). You hit a dribbler in the hole, you’re probably out. If there’s a guy on first, you’ve probably made two outs. You hit a scorcher in the hole, you’re on first base. It seems to me we’re not quite advanced enough in our measurement of various types of hits to be able to use BABIP effectively. We just lump everything into one of three Cro-Magnon categories: grounder, fly ball, line-drive. Some day, this is going to look pre-historic to future baseball analysts.

Along the same lines, consider the plane of a line-drive. Line-drives have all kinds of different arcs, of course, not to mention speeds. You have the line-drive that flies parallel to the ground until it just clears the infield, dropping in front of the outfielder. Then you have the Bo Jackson line-drive that clears the outfield wall before it starts to descend. Then there’s all of the gray area between a line-drive and a fly ball. Where is that line exactly? What does the angle/speed of line drive have to be, is it a universal definition, and do analysts accurately measure the arcs of batted balls in such a uniform way that we can be comfortable with line-drive statistics. Shouldn’t there be classes of both line-drives and grounders (and bunts…good bunts vs. bad ones), shouldn’t we take situational hitting into account—sac flies, hit-and-runs, advancing the runner—and remove all of these plays from BABIP stats?

I think, in a round-about way, Smellinger (that’ s what my bro and I affectionately call him) was sort of articulating all of these questions. Because if you were to measure hits and classify them in these specific ways, you’d have to concede that luck plays a smaller role that we might otherwise think it does.

Tony Goodwin used to claim that he had control over where in the ballpark he hit a ball. He was the ultimate situational hitter; if the scenario called for a hit to right field, he could inside-out his swing, adjusting for the speed/movement of the pitch. Or he could pull it to left, or find the gaps almost as if the bat were a pool cue. Now, this was always hard to believe, but I believed it. I think this ability is extremely rare, but I do believe it exists. And if it does, at least for those players, you would have to factor luck even further out of the equation.

Shoot me. Tony Gwynn.

I should stop drinking coffee right now.

Here are my questions about the pitching side of BABIP; direct me to an article that addresses this. Are there pitches designed to induce harmless pop-ups? I would think knuckle balls fall into this category. Watch a good hitter hit a can of corn; he gets extremely pissed off, throws the bat in disgust. He definitely doesn’t want to hit a pop-up. And the pitcher loves it. It seems to me that many times, that’s the exact result the pitcher was trying for. I mean, why even use the phrase “fly-ball pitcher” unless we are suggesting that there are pitchers who deliberately attempt to induce pop-ups and are good at it? Of course, Banny covered this very well year before last. He said he intentionally pitched to contact, and that he was able to manipulate said contact. Of course, ground-ball pitchers make the same claim. So if the pitcher can manipulate what kind of contact he gets, doesn’t that also factor luck (to some degree) further out of the equation that most people who use BABIP seem to do?

I freely admit I haven’t studied BABIP arguments nearly enough, and so treat these as questions rather than statements. I’m a student in the classroom, I’m just raising my hand here.

most of what you are saying seem like valid ways players could influence BABIP. the counter argument to that is that empirically, players don’t ‘seem’ to be able to consistently do that. Maybe Tony Gwynn did. Sticking with Aviles tho, your argument becomes he must be exceptional in his ability to do these things, like Gwynn.

I not saying your wrong here, quite the opposite, you have pointed out a number of additional factors that should be considered.

Ask yourself this, what does Mike Aviles (or others like him) do to a baseball that nobody else in baseball does? That’s the question we want to answer for these outliers. Is he different or lucky?