#babip

Daniel Kucin Jr.-Imagn Images This year, Josh Bell returned to Washington with a new goal in mind. “What this team needs is slug,” he told reporters during a Zoom call when he signed back in January. He explained that although he’d always prided himself on making contact and avoiding strikeouts – Bell’s career strikeout rate is 14% below the league average and his slugging percentage is 5% above…

Jay Biggerstaff-USA TODAY Sports What a wild ride it’s been for Jake McCarthy the past three seasons. In 2022, he finished fourth in NL Rookie of the Year voting, seemingly the right fielder of the future for the Arizona Diamondbacks. It wasn’t the kind of performance that would make anyone think that he — and not Corbin Carroll — was Arizona’s franchise player. But it was the kind of performance…

Sports Betting 101: The Top 10 tips YOU need to know when making bets in the MLB.         Looking for sports betting tips and strategy when handicapping baseball? In the latest episode in the Sports Betting 101 Series on WagerTalk TV, Minty Bets sits down with Teddy Covers to go over his Top 10 Winning Tips for Betting on Baseball. Some of the MLB betting tips from Teddy: Understand Math: -200…

the Dorky Mets: BABIP and Mets Baseball

Episode 8: BABIP and Mets baseball – The Dorky Mets Show We get into what BABIP is and apply it to the Mets offense. We also discuss the offensive woes and discuss why we are not concerned. — This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/thedorkymetsshow/support Episode 8: BABIP and Mets…

SP observations through 21 April 2018 from the MadProf.

Hi sports fans.  I’m back from a brief hiatus in the auld sod where I did some good work and had a proper Guinness in a proper pub.  As your gentle scribe scribbles, he notes that we are now just past the 10% point of the season.  Teams have played about 20 games.  The weather is feeling more like baseball weather.  Not too soon to hang those Christmas lights!

And let’s all pause a minute to note…

2018 SP: Avoid Kershaw? Sale? MadProf Heresies 1.0

Actually, this is a brief reflection on Fantasy SP, reality, the human body and the laws of physics.

As he went into his windup, Bugs Bunny told us: “Watch me paste this pathetic palooka with a powerful paralyzing perfect pachhydermas percussion pitch!”  The featured image, by the way, was Created by Friz Freleng/Courtesy of Warner Bros.  Bugs was superhuman in beating the Gashouse Gang that…

Now, last week, I talked about the continued tradition of having Cuban players play on the south side of Chicago. I hinted at my post for this week saying that the White Sox should perhaps sign Yasiel Puig in the 2018-2019 free agency class. 

I created a project for myself using Tableau Public and running a regression in R. The project was: find the outfielder that will give you the most benefit and for the lowest cost in the 2019 season from the 2018-2019 free agent class.   

Using Tableau Public, I joined three different sources: two Fangraphs pages and one BaseballSavant page.

I took, what I deemed, as the most important power-hitting categories from 2017 to compare the outfielders: Average Launch Speed, Average Launch Angle, BABIP, OBP, HRs, and Road Batting AVG.

Launch Speed: to determine which player hit the ball the hardest

Launch Angle: to determine who was more likely to get the ball in the air, which would lead to more home runs 

BABIP: to see who was hitting the ball and getting lucky or not

OBP: to determine which players got on base the most

HR: to see which players hit for the most power 

Road Batting AVG: to show which players could hit outside of their home ballpark (Coors Field will inflate stats, compared to another park)

In addition, I added a link under each player's name and age that allows you to access the free agent Spotrac page for historical salary information. (The name of my Tableau Public file is in the screenshot above, if you want to find the actual file). I then filtered out players that had less than a 10-degree launch angle. 

From these six important statistics and my data visualization, Yasiel Puig, Bryce Harper, and Andrew McCutchen would be the best overall adds. From there, I ran a regression based on each of those player's salaries from the past seven seasons (as seen in the two graphs above). I realized that both Andrew McCutchen and Bryce Harper had salaries were projecting well above the linear regression line for salary, meaning they will be, most likely, getting paid the most after 2018.  However, I saw that Yasiel Puig was underneath the regression line for the past two seasons. Being a 26-year-old power hitter and leading in 2017 Average Launch Speed.

SABERmetrics Sunday: An Update on BABIP

Back in the opening months of the season, we discussed which players were leading the majors in BABIP (Batting Average of Balls in Play). In the early parts of the season, the top BABIPs were well over .400 for a number of players. It was determined based on previous data that having batted balls put in play at a .400+ average over an entire season is not sustainable, and eventually those BABIP…