BABIP Validations Using xBABIP – The Leaders

Last week, I discussed the two month BABIP overachievers, identifying names whose marks significantly exceeded my xBABIP. Now let’s take a look at some of the hitters whose high BABIP marks are actually validated by xBABIP. These are the guys who at first glance, your knee-jerk reaction might be to expect heavy regression, but the underlying skills that drive BABIP suggest there has been little fortune involved. That’s not to say that the hitters are going to sustain such skills, but that looking backward, the results have been legitimate.

BABIP Validations – The Leaders
Name LD% True FB% True IFFB% Hard% Spd Pull GB While Shifted% % BIP Shifted BABIP xBABIP BABIP-xBABIP
Tim Beckham 25.0% 27.7% 0.7% 46.4% 5.0 1.2% 3.7% 0.386 0.383 0.003
Keon Broxton 26.4% 27.3% 1.8% 32.7% 8.4 0.7% 3.1% 0.356 0.367 -0.011
Domingo Santana 25.7% 28.6% 1.4% 35.7% 3.8 0.9% 7.8% 0.349 0.348 0.001
Travis Shaw 23.0% 29.8% 3.1% 37.3% 5.4 9.1% 60.8% 0.344 0.329 0.015

If you bought in to post-post-post-post-post-post hype prospect Tim Beckham, you’d be looking rather pretty right about now. Can you believe that his xBABIP actually stands at .383?! That’s second highest in baseball (after xStats darling Nick Castellanos obviously). Beckham has pushed all his BABIP skills into elite territory — hits lots of line drives, rarely pop it up (just one all season), hit the ball very hard, display decent speed, and rarely face the shift. He still swings and misses a ton and is allergic to the base on balls, so he needs to sustain these BABIP skills to continue providing strong offensive value. Lucky for him, Matt Duffy’s timetable is up in the air, so his playing time is going to be secure for a while longer.

The arrival of Lewis Brinson means that Keon Broxton’s playing time will be at serious risk once Ryan Braun returns from the disabled list, but for the second year in a row of 200 at-bat samples, he has proven to be a BABIP monster. He has essentially been Beckham, but with more speed and less oomph. Though it’s kind of pathetic that even with a .356 BABIP, he’s still only able to muster a .224 batting average. At least last year he was walking at a mid-teens clip. That rate has been more than cut in half, which is simply unacceptable when you’re not that far above the Mendoza Line. Unfortunately, UZR suggests he has been a liability defensively, after being fantastic last year, so his time may almost be up as a starter. Time to scramble for a replacement in my LABR league 🙁

Domingo Santana doesn’t seem like the type of hitter you would expect a high BABIP from. He has big power and a bit of speed, and had been surprised to see him here until I discovered that he’s been posting .330+ BABIP marks every year! His profile is rather Broxton like, except for a slightly higher Hard% and obviously significantly less speed. But Santana is no zero there. He also rarely grounds into the shift. His offense has spiked thanks to a nice drop in strikeout rate, but that’s simply because he’s swinging more. That’s the formula when you don’t make great contact! If you swing three times, you’re probably going to put it in play in one of those tries, whereas if you take two called strikes and have a high SwStk%, you’re going to strike out often.

Travis Shaw posted xBABIP marks of just .272 and .262 the last two seasons, and yet here he is at .329. The difference is a jump in line drive rate and swapped his grounder and fly ball rates. The latter is bad for his power, but good for his batting average. Since he was such a fly ball hitter the last two seasons, you wonder if this is just a two month fluke with regards to his grounder and fly rates. Whether he reverts back to his fly ball heavy ways will tell us where his batting average is headed. But for fantasy owners, you might root for somewhere in between. He has also grounded into the shift less frequently than last year and teams are now shifting him a bit less often as a result, which left-handed hitters really have to do, as long as it doesn’t dramatically change their swings and/or power.





Mike Podhorzer is the 2015 Fantasy Sports Writers Association Baseball Writer of the Year. He produces player projections using his own forecasting system and is the author of the eBook Projecting X 2.0: How to Forecast Baseball Player Performance, which teaches you how to project players yourself. His projections helped him win the inaugural 2013 Tout Wars mixed draft league. Follow Mike on Twitter @MikePodhorzer and contact him via email.

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awy
6 years ago

how do you assess this approach with going by a more statcast granular breakdown. there’s a xBA on statcast search too