“Do you know what the difference between hitting .250 and .300 is? That's 25 hits...25 hits in 500 at bats is 50 points...ok. There's six months in a season. That's about 25 weeks. That means if you get just one extra flare a week, just one. A gork, you get a ground ball, you get a ground ball with eyes! You get a dying quail, just one more dying quail a week and you're in Yankee Stadium.” – Crash Davis (Bull Durham, 1988)
That, ladies and gentlemen, is BABIP in a nutshell. Sometimes it really is better to be lucky than good. One of the primary ways to measure the role luck plays in hitting and pitching is BABIP. That being said, there is much more to BABIP than just luck. Understanding BABIP and what goes into it can be very important for fantasy players looking for an advantage over their league mates.
What is BABIP?
BABIP is an acronym for batting average on balls in play. BABIP measures how often batted balls fall for hits. One way to think of BABIP is batting average if we take out strikeouts. BABIP is only measuring balls put in play.
For the purposes of BABIP, think of balls in play as batted balls that a fielder could conceivably make a play on. A home run is not considered a ball in play. That leads us to the formula for calculating BABIP -- BABIP = (H – HR)/(AB – K – HR + SF).
So as we stated above, home runs do not count, and neither do strikeouts, so both are subtracted from the hits and at-bats. Sacrifices do count, however, so they are added to at-bats.
How do we use BABIP for fantasy?
The lazy answer is that you look for players with an extreme BABIP (either high or low), expect that players’ BABIP to normalize going forward. The league average BABIP is around .300, and if we didn’t know anything else, we could expect an extreme BABIP to move closer to .300 over time.
This rudimentary approach to using BABIP for fantasy works, to some degree. All else being equal, BABIP does tend to regress to the mean over time. There are two problems with this approach, however.
BABIP is not entirely a function of luck. Players, especially batters, do have some control over whether or not they have a high (or low) BABIP. Before you assume a player’s (or team’s) BABIP has changed largely due to luck, you have to make sure nothing else has changed that could account for the change in BABIP.
This obviously requires a greater understanding of BABIP and what contributes to it. Once we understand the factors that can contribute to BABIP, we can look at them to try to make sense of a player’s BABIP.
In the end, assuming a player’s circumstances are largely unchanged, we would expect that player’s BABIP to regress to his career average, not the league average. Lorenzo Cain has a .339 BABIP through 3894 career at-bats. If we are projecting his BABIP for 2018 we should start at .344, not the league average of .300. If he has consistently been better than league average in his career, the odds are he will continue to do so, even if he didn’t last season.
Before we get into the factors that contribute to BABIP, there are a few important baselines we can establish for fantasy players as they look at BABIP. As we mentioned above, the league average for BABIP is around .300. No one has ever had a career BABIP over .380, and the highest career mark for an active player is Yoán Moncada at .369. Conversely, Austin Hedges has the lowest active BABIP at .247. Max Kepler is second at .253. If you see a BABIP that falls below .260 or above .360, it should probably cause you to raise an eyebrow or even two.
The other important rule of thumb for fantasy players with regards to BABIP is that hitters have more control over BABIP than pitchers do. Hopefully, this will become clearer once we look at the various factors that contribute to BABIP. Once the pitcher throws the ball, the result is (please forgive the pun) out of his hands. What happens next is up to the batter, the fielders and the fates.
What contributes to BABIP?
There are five main factors that contribute to BABIP. They are: the type of contact, the quality of contact, the placement of contact, ballpark and luck. Let’s take an in-depth look at each one in turn.
- Type of Contact
Not all batted balls are created equal. Line drives go for hits more often than ground balls, which are hits more often than fly balls. This should make sense intuitively, even if you have never really thought about it or looked at the numbers. Let’s illustrate the point with a brief thought experiment.
Picture yourself at home on your couch on a warm summer evening watching your local baseball team on television. Your favorite player comes to bat, and on the first pitch, he hits a line drive to the left side. You lose sight of the ball for a split second while the broadcast changes to a different camera shot, and the next thing you know the line drive has been caught by the shortstop. How do you react? Are you surprised? Perhaps disappointed?
Now, picture the same exact scenario, except instead of a line drive, the batter hits a ground ball, or a fly ball, that goes for an out. Are you disappointed? Are you at all surprised? That is because we know intuitively from watching hours of baseball that line drives go for hits more than other contact. That is why for years and years Little League coaches have tried to get their players to hit line drives.
What this means for our purposes is, in general, players who hit a lot of fly balls will have a lower BABIP. Players with a lot of line drives do better, especially if they combine those line drives with a good number of ground balls.
One of the reasons ground balls are better for BABIP than flyballs is ground balls give the runner an opportunity to beat out the throw for a base hit. This is one of the biggest reasons guys like Christian Yelich ,Yoán Moncada and Tim Anderson are near the top of the career BABIP list for active players. Trea Turner , with a 48.2% groundball rate and a .338 career BABIP, could wind up being a similar player over his career, at least until he starts to slow down.
- Quality of Contact
This is another factor that is obvious when you think about it. The more often you hit the ball hard, the more hits you will get in the long run. Over the course of a few months or even an entire season you may hit the ball hard with nothing to show for it, but if you keep that up long enough, balls will eventually start to fall for hits.
It makes some degree of sense that Aaron Judge is third among active players in BABIP and also the active leader in hard hit percentage. It would be reasonable to look at a young hitter with a high strikeout rate like Joan Moncada and conclude his batting average will drop significantly in 2020. That being said, if he can build on his career-high 39.3-percent hard hit rate from 2019, he may not suffer much of a drop in batting average even if his strikeout rate remains high. Javier Báez continues to defy convention by batting .280 while striking out more than 25-percent of the time, in part because he’s had a hard hit rate over 35-percent over the last two years.
In addition to hard hit percentage, another way to possibly measure quality of contact is average exit velocity. Nelson Cruz was seventh in the league in average exit velocity last season, and he finished eighth in BABIP. Aaron Judge was second in exit velocity in 2019 and would have been fifth in BABIP if he had enough at-bats to qualify. Neither hard hit percentage nor average exit velocity is a perfect measure of quality of contact, but they can give you a pretty good idea, especially when you consider the type of contact as well.
- Placement of Contact
Hall of Famer Wee Willie Keeler’s motto was “Keep your eye on the ball and hit ‘em where they ain’t.” In the current era of extreme shifting defense, hitting ‘em where they ain’t is more important than ever. While a lot of players saw declining BABIPs as a result of the shift, left-handed pull hitters have been most affected. This is just one example of the ways in which defense has a huge impact on BABIP, especially for pitchers.
As we discussed above, a pitcher’s BABIP allowed depends quite a bit on that pitcher’s defense. The pitcher can control the type and quality of contact to some degree, but they can’t control if the shortstop can get to the ground ball in the hole or make a strong enough throw to get the runner at first base.
Jon Lester and José Quintana are a great example of this. They finished first and third in BABIP allowed last season, when the Cubs finished 21st in MLB in defensive runs saved. In 2018, the Cubs were ninth in defensive runs saved, and Lester and Quintana finished 21st and 30th in BABIP, respectively. It’s a lot easier for the opposing team to hit it where they ain’t when your defensive isn’t very good.
When we consider BABIP for hitters, it is useful to look at batted ball direction statistics (Pull%, Cent%, Oppo%). Pull heavy hitters are easier to defend, and a low BABIP for those players may be a sign of things to come. Last year, Albert Pujols and Max Kepler had the highest pull percentages in baseball, and they had the third and fourth-lowest BABIPs. Jurickson Profar had the lowest BABIP and finished eighth in pull rate, while Joc Pederson was sixth and 10th, respectively.
Pederson faced a shift a career-high 265 times last season. Combine that with a career-high 49-percent pull rate, and it comes as little surprise his BABIP was well below his career average. In fact, it’s kind of surprising it wasn’t worse.
- Ballpark
Trevor Story is seventh among active players in BABIP, and while his 43.4-percent career hard hit rate is partially responsible for that, playing in Coors field doesn’t hurt. Much like fielding and positioning are important for BABIP, so are a ballpark’s dimensions. Because Coors Field has such a big outfield, a lot of fly balls and line drives drop in for hits that would probably be outs in other ballparks.
The Coors ballpark effects are even more telling for starting pitchers like German Márquez , who allowed a .236 BABIP on the road last season and a .388 BABIP at home. That is likely the reason Marquez’s strikeout rates and walk rates were so much lower on the road than at home. Marquez knew he could pitch to contact on the road, while he had to try to miss bats at home because any contact was more likely to wind up being a hit.
- Luck
As Crash Davis so eloquently put it in the quote at the beginning of this article, Luck plays a large role in both batting average and batting average on balls in play. One extra lucky hit per week can make a huge difference by the end of the season, and you probably wouldn't even notice without looking at BABIP. In Moneyball (The book by Michael Lewis, not the movie), Scott Hatteberg has a couple of quotes that illustrate why it is foolish to ignore the role luck plays in batting average.
Talking about his time with the Red Sox, Hatteberg said ”I’d have games when I’d have two hits and I didn’t take a good swing the whole game,” he said, “and it was like ‘Great game, Hatty.’” As he told it, his experience was different in Oakland. “Here I go 0-for-3 with two lineouts and a walk and the general manager comes by my locker and says, ‘Hey, great at bats.’”
As fantasy players, you want to target the batters who will have great at-bats. If you have enough great at-bats, you will eventually get good results, even if you can go an entire season without seeing them.
We have mentioned a few times already that pitchers’ BABIPs tend to be influenced heavily by the defense behind them. They are also influenced quite a bit by luck. So often, a ball will sneak through the infield or split the outfielders that would have been caught, perhaps rather easily, if it was a foot or two in either direction. Those simple twists of fate can add up over time.
Now that we have discussed BABIP, how to think about it for fantasy and the factors that contribute to it, let’s finish our discussion of BABIP by taking a close look at three notable BABIPs from 2019. These are players who could be difficult to evaluate for 2020, but you get a more complete picture once you dive into their 2019 numbers.
Ramirez was one of the best hitters fantasy hitters in 2017, batting .318 with 29 home runs and 17 stolen bases. His batting average plummeted in 2018 thanks to a .252 BABIP, but nobody noticed because he hit 39 home runs and stole 34 bases. It was widely believed Ramirez’s BABIP and batting average would bounce back in 2019, after all, he had batted better than .310 with a BABIP over .315 in both 2016 and 2017. Instead, his batting average dropped to .255 in 2019, thanks in part to a .256 BABIP. The Fangraphs projections all have Ramirez bouncing back to something just south of his .280 career batting average and .286 career BABIP. How much Ramirez’s BABIP bounces back likely hinges on his batted ball profile. Ramirez had a career-low 33.4-percent ground ball rate in 2018, and it went even lower in 2019. Ramirez’s 46.5-percent flyball rate was the sixth-highest in baseball in 2019, and it probably can’t get much higher. If it stays the same, he probably bats in the .260s and hits around 35 home runs. If his flyball rate drops to his career average of 40.1-percent, we can expect a few less home runs but a nice little bump in batting average.
Anderson’s 2019 is a good example that sometimes over the course of one season, the impossible can happen. It shouldn’t be possible to have a 2.9-percent walk rate and lead the league in batting average, but it happened. Anderson cut his strikeouts down significantly from his first three seasons, which helped, but the real driver of his batting average was his .399 BABIP. His career BABIP is .345, and I would take the under on that figure for 2020.
Flaherty is considered one of the best young pitchers in baseball, and for good reason, but he allowed the third-lowest BABIP in baseball last season, which is a big reason why his 2.75 ERA was so much better than his 3.46 FIP. So long as Flaherty continues to strike out more than 10.5 batters per nine innings without a crazy walk rate, fantasy players probably won’t mind if his BABIP rebounds in 2020.