Each Thursday we will be covering different statistics that have very strong uses for fantasy. They are not stats that get used for ranking, but they can greatly affect your team. Some we already use on this site, and others we will discuss if they can be used for our analysis.
Part II
Last week we discussed hitting from the regards of walking and making contact. This time we will look into how the skills we studied from Part I effect a players BABIP, Average and OBP.
BABIP
Until recently many used (LD% + .120 = BABIP) to calculate an expected BABIP, but there has been much more work put into this recently and found some more variables to incorporate. Here is a study by Chris Dutton and Peter Bendix and you can see the variables they use to estimate BABIP. Looking through their research you can see the important factors to be a player who shows an elevated BABIP consistently. High LD%, good Speed score, high number of extra base hits, ability to hit to all fields, number of pitches, park factors and lefty hitters have an advantage as well.
Looking through this grouping you can see why young players often have elevated BABIP in their early careers. This is why looking for .300 hitters just by a BB% and K% like some sites suggest is not enough. I would suggest using previous seasons as the best judge since this expected BABIP is not yet being offered as a stat on any site. Just take into account a chance for deteriorating skills and any speed loss may be factors for a BABIP decrease.
Average and OBP
Once you address all these factors you can start to see what a true hitters skill is regarding getting on base. Although average is less important in real baseball it has a different value in fantasy. Average has the ability to increase a players RBI output as well, so it is still an important stat, but is greatly over valued.
OBP in fantasy is not a stat in most leagues, but as I have discussed before is much more important than most managers account for. OBP is a judge of the number of chances a player will have to steal a base, score a run and a higher OBP usually indicates a better eye for pitch selection.
Conclusion
So what should you take form these two reviews? Hitting is a diverse ability that cannot be simply addressed by rules like .300 hitters have a 80% contact rate and a 10% walk rate. Out of the 69 hitters in 2008 who reached those levels only 24% had a .300 average. If you account for luck and look at the 42 hitters who had those ratios and had 300 AB's it is only 33% with a .300 average.
There is no easy recipe for projecting a hitters batting average, but make sure your projections aren't based on over simplified analysis. If you really wanted to go with a simple analysis I would add a level for BABIP into the analysis using BB% and K%. Of the hitters with a BABIP of .300 and 300 AB's with the correct BB% and K% there were 53% had a BABIP of .308. BABIP plays to much of a factor to be ignored when evaluating a hitter for good average. After finding a list of hitters who maintain the K and BB levels look for hitters with elevated BABIP levels over their career.
Hitters Skill - Part I
