2016 MLB Draft Guide: Understanding BABIP and Line Drive Rates

In another article in this Guide I discussed ground ball and fly ball ratios, including the home run, but in this piece I will break down two measures you will likely hear frequently if you read my work or listen to people talk baseball. It’s next level stuff but far from being so complicated that you need an advanced degree in analytics. I’ll tell you what the measures mean and how to understand what the data is telling you.

WHAT IS BABIP?

BABIP, or Batting Average on Balls In Play is also referred to as a player's hit rate. It is the rate at which batted balls end up as base hits. There is one caveat with BABIP – it removes home runs from the equation because technically the ball isn't in play on a home run (it never lands in the field of play). Here is the simple formula in play for the measure we call BABIP. 

(H-HR) / (AB-K-HR+SF) 

*SF = sacrifice fly

HOW DO YOU UNDERSTAND BABIP?

1) The major league average for BABIP is traditionally in the .290-300 range. 

(2) Players tend to establish their own level of BABIP production over the years. That means if a guy has produced a .275 mark for three seasons and then he suddenly produces a .325 mark, chances are better than even that his BABIP number will regress. However, if a player produced a .325 mark year after year and then slumps to .275 in the following year it doesn't always mean he will remain at that lower mark moving forward. Whether good or bad, players tend to establish a somewhat consistent pattern over the course of multiple seasons with a rolling three season timeframe suggesting a decent baseline.

2015 MLB AVERAGE FOR BABIP

(3) A player who is performing at a rate that is below his established level can be said to be hitting in a bit of "bad" luck. That's too simplistic of course, but it's a down and dirty way to look at it. A player who is performing at a rate that is above his established level can be said to be hitting in "good" luck. This is also far too simplistic. That being said, here are some notes as it pertains to the 2015 performance of some of the leading hitters in baseball that can help you place some context around their BABIP efforts.

As a general rule, any performance over .350 has to be looked at with a huge degree of skepticism as the number is extremely tough to consistently reach. Over the last three seasons combined, 2013-15, there have only been 12 men in baseball with a .350 BABIP.
 

As you can see only four men are over .360 the last three seasons. Obviously that means the following 12 hitters, who were all over .360 last season, are in grave danger of a pullback in 2016 – it’s just not a sustainable pace.
 

There are a bunch of others over .340 as well that have me nervous heading into 2016 (there are 10 others over that mark in addition to the list above). Here are a few of them in detail:

.359 – Francisco Cervelli actually has a .370 BABIP over his last 597 at-bats. Doesn’t exactly have speed to augment the stick.

.350 – Brock Holt does own a .340 career mark, though I can’t help but be nervous about a guy who owns a .350 BABIP over his last 237 games when he also owns an inordinately high 25.1 percent line drive rate in that time.

.350 – Nelson Cruz owns a .306 career mark and was under .302 each of the four seasons before last year’s bust out effort at 35 years of age.

.347 – Yunel Escobar owns the same .306 career mark as Cruz and only once in the previous five seasons was the mark over .285.

Now for the hitters who struggled according to BABAIP in 2015:

.217 – Albert Pujols was the worst qualifier in baseball last season. There is improvement coming but not that he was barely at .260 in 2013-14.

.237 – Jose Bautista is never a BABIP beast, and given that he routinely socks a ton of homers that’s OK. Still, he was only seven points off his career .257 batting average last season despite losing .030 points off his career BABIP.

.251 – Jay Bruce has a career mark of .287. He posted his lowest K-rate in six years. In three of the previous four seasons his BABIP was at least .283.

.261 – Brian Dozier actually shouldn’t expect any change. Remember how I noted how players set their own baselines? Over the four seasons of his big league career his BABIP has been virtually unchanged: .267, .278, .269 and .261.

.284 – Carlos Gonzalez rarely beats out hits anymore, so it’s all about hitting the ball with him. CarGo was also at .283 in 2014 which causes some concern, but his career mark is .335 and from 2009-12 the mark was never lower than .326.

(4) A final note. BABIP tells us what has happened. While we can use that as a way to look into the future it’s not a predictive measure. Just because a guy has a mark of .250 in the first half does not mean the mark will go up to .350 in the second half to get to the league average of .300. It’s likely the .250 guy will improve in the second half, but how much goes beyond just BABIP.

But wait, BABIP applies to pitchers as well. Here are pitchers that were very fortunate when it came to BABIP in 2015.

Here are the pitchers that gave up more than their fair share of hits:

WHAT ARE LINE DRIVE RATES?

The league line drive rate in 2015 was 21 percent.

A mark over 25 percent is unlikely to be repeated with great frequency. 

A mark under 18 percent with solid players means you should look closer to try and determine just what caused such a fall. There might be more than the raw line drive rate number to consider.

Remember, it is also thought that hitters have a bit more control than do pitchers in terms of being able to produce line drives.

HOW DO YOU UTILIZE LINE DRIVE RATES?

Line drive rates can be somewhat predicted by the rolling three-year trend we also talked about with HR/F ratio. By that I mean if you take a look at the previous three seasons of line drive work you can often surmise a fair target mark for the coming season. Note, though, that there isn’t an extremely high correlation with line drive rates year after year so looking at a broader swath, like the three years I suggested, is more helpful than a smaller segment of games. Also, a line drive off the bat of Dee Gordon certainly isn’t as impactful as one of the bat of Giancarlo Stanton, so it’s not as if all line drives are created equal, which adds even more uncertainty to the measure.

There’s also this key point: It stands to reason that there must be a strong relationship between line drive rates, base hits and BABIP. It makes all the sense in the world really. There’s just one issue: it’s not actually true. Why is that? You already know why, we just have to put the pieces together.

Not all line drives are hits. Not all hits are line drives. Therefore, a line drive rate could be high but the BABIP could be low if, for the sake of argument, the player lines 12 balls into the gloves of a defender over the course of the year. The line drive rate will suggest success while the BABIP might be lacking. Generally speaking you can say if one mark is high and the other is low there is a chance for an evening out of both, but that’s just a general position to take and it’s no lock to actually become reality.

Here are the 2015 leaders. Note that marks over 25 percent are extremely difficult to repeat year after year. In point of fact, here are the line drive leaders the last three seasons:

Only 13 men in baseball reached the 25 percent plateau in 2015:

Just as the men who are over the top high have a concern, how about the men at the other end of the spectrum? Here are the men who struggled to hit the ball on the screws:

Remember context, as in with Jose Bautista, the career mark he owns in the line drive rate is just 15.4 percent. He doesn’t have much room to grow.

Here are the top hurlers from 2015:

Here are the hurlers who were hit pretty darn hard last season:

BABIP and line drive rates are part of the story. They help to paint this picture but they certainly aren’t definitive when it comes to analyzing player performance. Throw it in to the hopper as two of the weapons in your arsenal.