Posted by bad_luck on 5/22/2014 8:05:00 PM (view original):
Let's look at Pedro Alvarez.
He's having a rough 2014, hitting .217/.312/.373 with 8 home runs.
Will that get better? We need more info to make a reasonable guess.
His 2014 BABIP is .237. His career BABIP is .293.
We can guess, with some certainty (we'd really need to look at his batted ball profile to be more sure), that he will turn things around this year. It seems like he's been a victim of bad luck and it's likely that balls he puts in play will go for hits at a rate closer to his career average and his triple slash will go up.
Adding HR to BABIP clouds that picture because HR rate isn't a function of luck. HR rate needs to be separate so that you can evaluate it. A HR rate down significantly is a bad sign for future performance, not a good one.
When you're grounding balls into a shift constantly, it's not bad luck, it's bad approach. When you hit three pop fly home runs at Wrigley on a windy day.....balls that would normally be fly outs, it's a function of circumstance or luck. There's so many variables that can be tossed in there on any given day, that one has to wonder if advanced stats properly takes everything into consideration. I know Bill James recently changed his thinking on clutch hitting based on whether they were really looking at statistics properly when it came to clutch hitting, because all situations could not be accounted for in the way advanced stats are measured.
Baseball is not black and white, it's a game based a great bit on circumstance and situation. When you've watched 2-3,000 games in your life, you understand that moving a runner over is entirely preferable to not moving him over. You understand that just because there isn't much of a correlation to strikeout rate to runs scored over a season, in single games, it can play a huge factor between a win and a loss.