The 2015 Hitter xBABIP Underachievers – A Review

**To avoid confusion, yes this is supposed to read 2015. It’s a recap of my preseason article that discussed the 2015 xBABIP underachievers.

Today I continue to work my way through my preseason article recaps, this time focusing on xBABIP, the equation that the intelligent and very handsome Alex Chamberlain brewed up. We’ll start with the biggest underachievers from 2015. Let’s see how they performed this season.

Sure, Jed Lowrie’s BABIP surged to almost exactly his 2015 xBABIP, but he did little else for fantasy owners and was hurt for nearly half the season. He suddenly became a ground ball hitter and his power went MIA. Obviously, he’s just a mono league asset (placeholder?) at this point.

Isn’t it amazing that Albert Pujols, arguably the best hitter of our generation, owns a league average BABIP for his career and hasn’t posted a .300 mark since 2008? Last year’s career low .217 was obviously a fluke and one didn’t need a formula to figure his BABIP would rebound. His issues are hiding in plain sight — he doesn’t hit enough line drives and has posted a worse than league average IFFB% over his career. Oh, not to mention he’s an extreme pull hitter. The only positive thing he does that yields positive BABIP results is hit the ball hard. Heading into his age 37 season, it’s highly doubtful anything is going to change.

Welp, Hanley Ramirez sure rebounded nicely, proving that 2015, in which he stunk both offensively and defensively, was the fluke and that the Red Sox didn’t necessarily make a huge financial mistake. His batted ball profile was very similar to 2015 and sure enough, his BABIP spiked to settle in at an almost identical mark to his 2015 xBABIP. Playing first regularly should keep him on the field and off the DL.

Jayson Werth had always been a high BABIP guy, but he’s lost that the last two years. In fact, before 2015, he had only posted a BABIP below .304 once in his entire career! He’s hitting fewer line drives now, but his overall batted ball profile isn’t that much different from his career averages. Perhaps it’s just small declines across the board, including his speed. He’s still a solid hitter, but it’s hard to rely on the guy as he heads into his age 38 season.

Man, that second half was brutal for Jay Bruce, as he posted a BABIP no higher than .259 in any of the final three months. And in July, he posted a measly .183 mark! Still, his BABIP was higher than last year, though barely, and still fell short of his career average. He does pull the ball often and hits more flies than grounders, but everything else in his profile is good. I still feel like he should be better than this. I bet the Mets do as well.

Man, I really liked Ryan Zimmerman’s rebound chances this year and even though he managed to amass more plate appearances than in 2014 and 2015, he still wasn’t any good. And he posted a pathetic .277 wOBA! He stopped walking, his strikeout rate surged to a career high, and both his ISO and BABIP fell to career lows. Ughhhh. 2017 sleeper! He’s not that old as he just finished his age 31 season, so I really don’t understand what happened to him. Have injuries just taken their toll and he hasn’t truly been healthy these last couple of years? He’s going to come so cheaply, I have to think that he’ll be a good target in a deep league, especially NL-Only formats.

If you read my articles regularly, I really, really hope you rostered Jonathan Lucroy. Because not only was he atop my hitters with major HR/FB rate upside, but he was also a BABIP underperformer. That meant there were two avenues for upside, on the power and the batting average! Sure enough, he hits a career high number of homers and his batting average fully rebounded. Oddly, he hit more pop-ups than ever before, but he was still good enough despite those near automatic outs.

David Ortiz is yet another guy on this list whose 2016 BABIP finished awfully close to his 2015 xBABIP. Though he’s a pull and fly ball hitter, he makes up for those BABIP deficiencies by popping up infrequently and hitting the ball damn hard. His Hard% led baseball…at 39 years old. Amazing. We’ll miss you Big Papi.

Wilson Ramos‘ batted ball profile is atypical for the type of hitter he is. He’s sloth-like from a speed perspective and has good power, yet routinely posts ground ball rates in the mid-50% range. xBABIP does take speed into account, so those grounders aren’t really helping his case like they would if he were a burner. But he does avoid the pop-up and sprays the ball around the field. His career year was fueled by a career high BABIP, but sadly we won’t get to see a full healthy encore performance in 2017.

How could a guy as fast as Billy Hamilton, who avoided the pop-up and used the whole field, post a BABIP of just .264 in 2015?! Poor fortune, of course. He turned some fly balls into grounders this year, which certainly helped, but his BABIP simply spiked back to a level we all thought someone as fast as he is should be posting.

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Wowzers, this turned out to be one heck of a list of underachievers! Of the 10 hitters, nine of them increased their BABIP by an average of 0.049. That’s huge! That’s like a jump from .250 to .299! The list also hit on four guys who surely earned their owners big profits.