2022 Positive BABIP Regression Candidates

Just like .380 is unsustainably high, .230 is unsustainably low and a few of the players above hit that mark in 2021. Skills declines with age are certainly apparent in a few players (Blackmon, but maybe not?), while a few are three-true outcome types (Grandal), while others seem to still struggle with injury (Yelich). But mostly we see players that had a down year. There’s just no way LeMahieu, Bellinger, and Betts don’t rebound in my opinion and if people in your league are fading them, you should take advantage of that.

A player like Joey Votto, on the other hand, literally said he was going to change his approach and saw tremendous gains as a result. It’s pretty cool to see it happen in his stat line, but he’s not likely a bounce-back candidate when it comes to average or BABIP because of the nature of his change. The next table shows each player categorized and explained by their statcast “hp_to_1b” (measured in seconds and correlative with BABIP) and their batted ball profile (HardHit%, EV, LA, Barrel%) explained by one number by way of principal component analysis. I realized after writing last week’s article that I should have inverted this number, but for consistency’s sake, I kept it the same. Just keep in mind that a more negative number reflects a more attractive batted ball profile (see Votto).

Grandal was such a standout in 2021 because he just decided to stop swinging at bad pitches. His O-Swing% went to a career-low 18.7% and the league average was 31.3% in 2021. His patience earned him a 23.2% BB%, a career-high. But when it comes to BABIP, he qualifies for cluster one (red) because he had excellent batted ball skills and very low speed. He and Joey Votto are two peas in a pod in that regard. Moving to cluster five (yellow) we see Pham and Yelich as two players who got on base because they coupled speed and batted ball skills. Cluster four (black) and cluster two (blue) seem to be the most interesting because these are the players who are harder to figure out. Take Charlie Blackmon for example. I think he’s being unfairly written off as a player declining with age. Yes, he’s getting older, but his EV, MaxEV, Barrel%, and HardHit% all increased from 2020 to 2021 and he still plays in Colorado. Jason Heyward’s line drive percent decreased by 14%, Paul DeJong by 12.5%, and Francisco Lindor and Mookie Betts by 11% from 2020 to 2021. Perhaps I should have included line drive percent in the batted ball PCA, but the inclusion of launch angle should pick up on some of that. Lastly, cluster three isn’t hard to figure out. Maybe you could point to injury, but I wouldn’t expect the gains to be too big from these players in 2022.