{"id":121216,"date":"2015-06-07T15:33:30","date_gmt":"2015-06-07T20:33:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/monkeywithahalo.com\/?p=10805"},"modified":"2015-06-07T15:33:30","modified_gmt":"2015-06-07T20:33:30","slug":"mike-trout-babip-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesportsdaily.com\/news\/mike-trout-babip-2015\/","title":{"rendered":"Stat Sunday: Mike Trout and the BABIP Luck Dragons"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mike Trout is on his way to yet\u00a0another tremendous\u00a0season. He’ll enter\u00a0Monday with a .283\/.373\/.561 line, 16 home runs, 42 runs scored, and several highlight-reel defensive plays on his ledger, all culminating in 3+ WAR(P).\u00a0If he keeps up the pace, he’ll tally his fourth straight 8+ WAR season and become the fifth most valuable player in Angels franchise history. After just four full seasons!\u00a0Dude is incredible.<\/p>\n

For all the wonderful things Trout continues to do, though, there is one thing that has eluded him this season: a high BABIP. For the uninitiated, Batting Average on Balls In Play, or BABIP, works exactly like regular batting average (H\/AB), only with home runs and strikeouts removed from the equation (and sac flies added back in). It’s purpose is to determine how often a player reaches base safely on occasions when\u00a0the defense has an opportunity to make a play on the ball.<\/p>\n

The league average for BABIP almost always hovers around .290, and most players regress to this mean over the course of their careers. There are those like Trout, however, who regularly best this by a wide\u00a0margin. Most high-BABIP players typically fall into two categories: speedsters who beat out a lot of grounders\u2014think Dee Gordon and Ichiro\u2014or power guys who make a ridiculous amount of hard contact\u2014think Joey Votto and Miguel Cabrera. Trout used to be a freak combination of both of these, now he’s mostly the latter.<\/p>\n

Entering 2015, Trout owned a career BABIP of .361, which was good for fourth best in MLB history\u00a0<\/em>among players with at least 2,000 plate appearances.<\/p>\n

\"TroutCareerBABIP\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Some elite company, no?<\/p>\n

This season, though, the numbers haven’t been there for Trout. His .308 BABIP is still above average in the grand scheme of things, but is more than 40 points below his career low in a full season. Given that his overall stats are more or less right in line with those from last year (i.e. amazing), it’s worth trying to figure out whether there’s something Trout’s doing\u00a0that can explain the dip or if it’s simply a matter of the BABIP luck dragons<\/a>\u00a0wreaking havoc on a relatively small sample.<\/p>\n

The first place to look is in Trout’s batted-ball profile. BABIP tends to ebb and flow based on the interplay of four rate stats: GB\/FB, Line Drive %, FB\/HR, and Infield Fly %. The higher the former three and the lower the fourth, the higher a player’s BABIP should be. Why? Well because 1) ground balls (.233) go for\u00a0hits almost twice as often as\u00a0fly balls (.125) do; 2) line drives (.673) are nearly automatic knocks; 3) fly balls that go over the fence can’t hurt a player’s BABIP; and 4) pop-ups almost never fall in for hits.<\/p>\n

So is there anything that stands out in those four stats for Trout, compared to previous seasons?<\/p>\n

\"TroutBattedBallProfile\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Yes, absolutely there is, only in the opposite\u00a0direction to what we would’ve expected given his relatively low BABIP. Both Trout’s GB\/FB ratio is higher and IFFB% lower than in 2014, when he posted a .349 BABIP, and\u00a0his LD% and HR\/FB are career bests. If we were given just these numbers and asked to guess Trout’s BABIP, we would undoubtedly assume that it at least equaled last year’s mark, if not his incredible\u00a02012 (.383) and 2013 (.376) numbers. To be well\u00a0under<\/em>\u00a0all those numbers, then, leads me to believe Trout has been\u00a0the victim of some serious bad luck so far this season.<\/p>\n

Taking a closer look his\u00a0BABIP on certain types of batted balls backs up the\u00a0bad\u2013luck hypothesis:<\/p>\n

\"TroutBABIPtype\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I’ll concede that the small drop on grounders and flies might be due to optimized\u00a0defensive positioning against Trout, but nothing other than misfortune can explain the nosedive his BABIP on line drives has taken. Not only is it 130 points below his career norm, it’s also 120 points below the MLB\u00a0average for this season. The league hasn’t suddenly figured out how to catch more Trout line drives than anyone else’s.\u00a0Unless…<\/p>\n

Thanks to the implementation of StatCast<\/a>, we now have the ability to determine whether Trout’s simply not hitting his non-dingers\u00a0as hard as in previous seasons, and thus is putting his status as one of the sluggers in the Votto\/Cabrera high-BABIP camp in jeopardy. Is the reason Trout’s BABIP on line drives is so low because a lot of them are “soft” line drives\u2014i.e. jam shots that happen to leave the bat at the right angle to be classified as liners?<\/p>\n

*Holds breath*<\/p>\n

Probably not.\u00a0Among players with at least 10 line drives hit\u00a0this season, Trout’s average exit velocity of 95.42 mph ranks 78th, right between Josh Reddick and Michael Cuddyer. Giancarlo Stanton predictably sits atop the leaderboard at 106.41 mph, and Addison Russell brings up the rear at 91.67 mph. We could argue that Trout being closer to Russell than Stanton explains a little of his BABIP woes on line drives, but then we’d also have to explain how the same isn’t true for Prince Fielder (76th; .377 BABIP) and Bryce Harper (70th; .362 BABIP), among others.<\/p>\n

What’s more, Trout’s average exit velocity on all batted balls is elite. Even if his line drives aren’t traveling at a relatively high rate of speed, everything else he hits is, so\u00a0his BABIP should be higher.<\/p>\n

\"TroutExitVelo\"<\/a>
League leaders, minimum 100 AB.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

Stats like BABIP aren’t beholden to the arbitrary endpoint of a 162-game season, but everything we’ve laid out here seems to indicate\u00a0that Trout’s should climb back toward his career norms as the year progresses. And if his strikeout rate continues to hover around 22%, that could mean the return of “Mike Trout, .300 Hitter and .400 OBP-er.”<\/p>\n

I can’t friggin’ wait.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mike Trout is on his way to yet\u00a0another tremendous\u00a0season. He’ll enter\u00a0Monday with a .283\/.373\/.561 line, 16 home runs, 42 runs…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":564711,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[96690106],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStat Sunday: Mike Trout and the BABIP Luck Dragons - The Sports Daily<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/thesportsdaily.com\/news\/mike-trout-babip-2015\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Stat Sunday: Mike Trout and the BABIP Luck Dragons\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/thesportsdaily.com\/news\/mike-trout-babip-2015\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Sports Daily\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2015-06-07T20:33:30+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/thesportsdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/06\/kris4.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"395\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"594\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Alan Draper\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@sportsdailytsd\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@sportsdailytsd\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Alan Draper\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"NewsArticle\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/thesportsdaily.com\/news\/mike-trout-babip-2015\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/thesportsdaily.com\/news\/mike-trout-babip-2015\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Alan Draper\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/thesportsdaily.com\/#\/schema\/person\/2c8aadde2571800d0de74323730df7b5\"},\"headline\":\"Stat Sunday: Mike Trout and the BABIP Luck Dragons\",\"datePublished\":\"2015-06-07T20:33:30+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2015-06-07T20:33:30+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/thesportsdaily.com\/news\/mike-trout-babip-2015\/\"},\"wordCount\":983,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/thesportsdaily.com\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/thesportsdaily.com\/news\/mike-trout-babip-2015\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/thesportsdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/06\/kris4.jpg\",\"articleSection\":[\"Monkey with a Halo\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"copyrightYear\":\"2015\",\"copyrightHolder\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/thesportsdaily.com\/#organization\"}},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/thesportsdaily.com\/news\/mike-trout-babip-2015\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/thesportsdaily.com\/news\/mike-trout-babip-2015\/\",\"name\":\"Stat Sunday: Mike Trout and the BABIP Luck Dragons - 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