FanGraphs Chat – 10/26/11
Dave is a co-founder of USSMariner.com and contributes to the Wall Street Journal.
7 Responses to “FanGraphs Chat – 10/26/11”
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WAR is awesome….unless it tells me Austin Jackson or Ryan Doumit are decent players, in which case it is completely wrong.
Certain players on this site get vilified beyond what their stats would suggest is warranted. I think this is just narrative rearing its ugly head into this (mostly) purely rational site.
Agree Jake. Just this season AGon and Kemp had BABIP’s of .380, nobody says a thing about it. AJax hits .396 for one season and everybody has to point to his BABIP as soon as they can nevermind that Josh Hamilton was at .390 the same season. David Wright was at .394 in 09′.
I’m somewhat sick of seeing BABIP used as a sword to randomly discredit x player that someone has a bias against for whatever reason.
BABIP isn’t the same for every player; some people have high career BABIPs because their BiP distribution includes a lot of LDs, which is sort of a skill.
Because the fact that it explicitly does not include catcher defense is irrelevant to its evaluation of Doumit? And if Jackson keeps up his unheard of BABIP I expect they will write something specific about him the way they have about Matt Cain
Jackson’s .390 BABIP last year was insane and not expected from his previous years. Settling around .340, however, wouldn’t be too shocking (check his minor league numbers).
BUT, if someone wants to reject this and not buy into Jackson at all, then they should be tempering their thoughts on Shin-Soo Choo (or at least making similar comments about his BABIP). But, no one does this. Why? My guess is narrative. Jackson is the strikeout machine, and Choo is the 20-20 machine with a cannon for a left arm.
I was in class during the chat but was wondering about the win expectancy charts. Do they change year to year based upon the run environments? I would predict that a 3 run lead in the 5th inning led to a win more often this year than in previous years due to the lower run environment. Am I correct?