Nick The Unlucky Stick
Nick Johnson is having one of the more remarkable Aprils in recent memory, and not just because he’s managed to stay healthy for an entire month. No, instead, Nick Johnson is becoming the new poster child for why looking at results, and not the underlying skills, can lead to problems.
Johnson is posting a .216 batting average, so the easy narrative here is that he’s still getting his legs back under him after missing all of the 2007 season after a violent leg fracture in 2006. Perhaps the injury robbed him of some of his power, or he’s adjusting to a new swing that doesn’t allow him to drive the ball as far?
Or maybe he’s just hitting the ball on the screws, but it’s still finding it’s way into the defenders gloves? This is what his batted ball statistics certainly suggest. Johnson’s currently posting a 28.1% line drive percentage, fifth highest in the National League. Line drives go for hits 74% of the time, so if you’re smoking liners all over the field, you generally get a lot of base hits out of it. Not surprisingly, LD% correlates very well with batting average on balls in play, and as Dave Studeman showed four years ago, you can generally estimate a hitters BABIP by adding .11 or .12 to his LD%. Following this, and looking at Johnson’s line drive rate, we’d expect him to be posting a BABIP in the high .300s.
It’s actually .241, or about what we’d expect if he had a line drive rate of 12-13% – half of his actual line drive rate. Johnson is currently among the league leaders in LD% and simultaneously has one of the lowest BABIPs in the league. That’s pretty remarkable.
How much has it impacted his performance? Well, after seeing a similar thing happen to Chipper Jones during the 2004 season (LD% of 20.4%, BABIP of .251), JC Bradbury invented Projected OPS (PrOPS for short), which creates an expected BA/OBP/SLG line based on a player’s batted ball profile. It’s not perfect, but if you want to see a list of guys who are due for a regression to the mean, the extreme ends of the PrOPS leaderboard is a good place to start.
According to PrOPS, Nick Johnson’s batting line so far should be something like .336/.493/.549. It’s actually .216/.392/.432. The difference between his results and the expected results is 120 points of batting average, 100 points of on base percentage, and 130 points of slugging percentage. PrOPS thinks Johnson’s been something like the 5th best hitter in the National League in April, putting him just behind some guys named Burrell, Utley, Pujols, and the aforementioned Chipper Jones.
I’d say it’s safe to say that Nick Johnson is just fine. As always, the questions surrounding him should be about his health, not his abilities. If he avoids the disabled list, he looks poised for a big 2008 season.
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I’ve been waiting for this.
I’ve got Johnson in a very deep 15×15 league and was so excited about how late I got him.
I come back to FanGraphs often to be sure that my eyes aren’t fooling me, because I see no reason he shouldn’t be hitting over .300 with doubles galore (my league counts doubles).
I really have never considered actually dropping him, but thanks for the extra bit of encouragement.
What do you think of Cust then with this stat in mind? He’s even farther out on the edge of the PrOPS than Johnson…
Great post. As a huge Yankees fan, I’ve been wondering what the deal is with Robinson Cano and his .153 batting average. It seems he is in a similar situation as Nick Johnson. His LD% is 17.4 %, but his BABIP is only .165.
However, I guess Cano had this coming as he far exceeded his BABIP expectations the past two years:
2006: LD% – 19.9% BABIP – .363
2007: LD% – 16.9% BABIP – .331
Well, are there players who regularly exceed their BABIP numbers? Maybe there are some underlying skills there? Or are some players historically lucky?
There are batters who regularly exceed league average BABIP. Batters usually find their very own average BABIP and hover around that.
BABIP is less of a luck things for batters, but looking at a batters career BABIP vs his season BABIP is a good way to tell if he’s been lucky or unlucky.
So maybe Cano is a guy who’s usually going post a higher than normal BABIP, even if his LD% would say otherwise. Very interesting.
Are the Nationals a smart enough organization to realize what’s happening here?
Yes. Specifically, Manny Acta is smart enough to realize this.
You ROCK.
I picked up Johnson today. Tonight he goes 2 for 4 with an HR.
Anyone else we should be targeting? I need saves and HRs :-)
I was curious so I looked into this a little more. Using BABIP minus LD% as a measure of luck (negative values being unlucky), the most unlucky batter thus far (Min 50 PA) has been Tony Pena – LD%: 27.5%; BABIP: .185; Difference: -.090. Nick Johnson was 4th and Robinson Cano was 7th most unlucky.
On the flip side, assuming we can call a player lucky for having a large, positive value of BABIP minus LD%, the luckiest player thus far has been
Fred Lewis – LD%: 14.5%; BABIP: .415; Difference: +.273.
It’s amazing how Pena is hitting line drives almost twice as much as Lewis, yet his BABIP is 215 points lower!