| Sign Up | Google+

Some Unlucky Bounces

Stay connected for news and updates

Looking at a hitter's line drive rate and BABIP has been the generally accepted quick way to see if someone has been getting lucky or not on hits. There's a couple problems with it though. One is that sample size issues can be a problem. Also, hitters are individually different beasts and so applying a one size fits all rule is going to overgeneralize. Lastly, even ignoring those, those two pieces of information cannot tell you what kinds of hits are (or not) falling in. 

This is where wOBAr can pitch in. wOBAr takes a hitter's batted ball types and uses his own past success rates on each type to generate an expected wOBA line. There's some more stuff in this thread which I link to with a note saying that I've since exempted home runs from the regression. I took at the Mariners' park-adjusted wOBA's and their corresponding wOBAr's and using the difference (Diff) between the two, calculated the amount of runs that difference would entail.

Player Diff Runs
Griffey 15.9 0.9
Bradley 3.6 0.2
Wilson -27.5 -1.8
Suzuki 14.2 1.3
Figgins 10.1 0.9
Kotchman 61.9 4.8
Gutierrez -51.4 -4.6
Lopez -7.4 -0.7
Johnson 27.9 1.1
Byrnes 23.1 0.7
Moore 26.7 1.0
Langerhans 174.4 0.2
Sweeney 62.0 1.7
Tuiasosopo 17.4 0.3

Negative in the runs column means that the players has been "lucky" and that regressing his wOBA to his wOBAr would subtract away that many runs from the team. The total difference in runs scored? Six. That doesn't sound like a lot but over just 24 games that's a whopping 0.25 runs per game, which is quite huge. And given how close our games are, those missing runs are potentially even more impactful. 

True, the offense isn't stellar, but it's also been a tad snake bit so try not to freak yourself out too much.

                                                                                                                                                                                                               

Recent Posts

Stay connected for news and updates

The Next Read

There are 23 Comments. Load Now. Loading

Shortcuts to mastering the comment thread. Use wisely.

C - Next Comment
X - Mark as Read

R - Reply
Z - Mark Read & Next

Shift + C - Previous
Shift + A - Mark All Read

Comment Settings

Live comment alert: Hide it!

Comments for this post are closed.

tracking_pixel_5351_tracker