Soriano: Behind the BABIP

[Rob]

We are all aware of the troubles of our slumping left fielder at this point. Much has been made of his cold streak to start the season. After watching a few few people make snarky comments about his BA only going up due to "bloop hits" during Saturday's game, I decided to dig a little deeper.

 

Then I spent all my money on booze and strippers Saturday night, and forgot all about it for a while. But now my insomnia is back, and one of Colin's insightful posts triggered my memory... so this is what I came up with.

 

THT still hasnt been updated with yesterday's stats, so I was left to my own devices to figure out Soriano's current LD%. Since gameday only counted one of his drives last night as a liner, that's what I used as well.

 

Alfonso Soriano is currently hitting line drives 21.95% of the time at the dish, which is a tick above his career marks. In spite of this, his batting average on balls in play is a mere .244. On 78 balls put in play this season, he's collected base hits on only 19 of those. With average luck, he would have collected hits on 26.5 of those to match up with his expected BABIP of .340. (It's generally accepted that BABIP should be about LD% +.120)

 

We could take the easy route out and give him 7.5 extra singles to see how he'd be hitting. But that wouldn't be very accurate, as Soriano has been robbed of extra bases on occassion. We can easily keep his ratios intact of hits on balls in play when we add those 7.5 hits back in. (Sori is a little more than twice as likely to hit a single as a double). What we end up with is adding 5.1 singles onto his tally, and 2.4 doubles.

 

What we're left with is a player who, with neutral luck, would have put up a .308/.350/.514 line this season as well as he's hit the ball to this point. That's significantly better than his actual .232/.280/.414 line, and does an excellent job of illustrating the point that we need to be more patient in evaluating players with such tiny sample sizes to this point. Is he worth his contract? Almost certainly not... but he's not a problem on this team right now.

[JonnyRed]

Interesting stuff, but frankly I don't care if he uses his bat as a pool cue to get on base, as long as he reaches first at least 3 times every 10 plate appearances. I just love that ever since my Sox-lovin father-in-law spent 20 minutes trying to convince me that Soriano deserved to be on the bench, Zo has turned his season around---starting with the 2 run game-tying homer that same night! Guess I should thank the Cubs-hater....

[Abe Frohman]

The way I see it - the statistics are relative.

 

Yes, Soriano's numbers are down - and I think I see the point you are making. He started "slow" last year also. As well as the Cubs offense was clicking, it was hard to accept the change of having Soriano back in the lineup at the top for some of us.

 

It looks to me that he has found his stroke. He's hitting bullets and getting big hits. We know what kind of numbers he is going to put up, and he is on that clip right now.

 

Things are looking good, methinks....

[davearm2]

Terrific analysis Rob.

[Roast]

 

Yes, Soriano's numbers are down - and I think I see the point you are making. He started "slow" last year also.

That's not the point he's getting at at all, really. It's just the fact that Soriano has been terribly unlucky when it comes to balls in play actually dropping in for hits - thus causing the pathetic numbers early.

[Rob]

 

Yes, Soriano's numbers are down - and I think I see the point you are making. He started "slow" last year also.

That's not the point he's getting at at all, really. It's just the fact that Soriano has been terribly unlucky when it comes to balls in play actually dropping in for hits - thus causing the pathetic numbers early.

 

Exactly.

 

Put quite simply, Soriano has had about 7 or 8 hits get robbed from him. With less than 100 AB on the season, that's going to have a huge effect on his line... a line that doesn't accurately portray how well he' hit the ball.

[nilodnayr]

 

Yes, Soriano's numbers are down - and I think I see the point you are making. He started "slow" last year also.

That's not the point he's getting at at all, really. It's just the fact that Soriano has been terribly unlucky when it comes to balls in play actually dropping in for hits - thus causing the pathetic numbers early.

 

Exactly.

 

Put quite simply, Soriano has had about 7 or 8 hits get robbed from him. With less than 100 AB on the season, that's going to have a huge effect on his line... a line that doesn't accurately portray how well he' hit the ball.

 

Yeah, sample size is actually the bigger issue than being unlucky. LD% regression to the mean will mitigate some of the adjustment Rob made, but whatever you want to do to a batting line, if 7 hits results in 170 points of OPS difference, your conclusion is that the sample size is way too small to judge anything and people should stop PMSing about Sori.

[Abe Frohman]

 

Yes, Soriano's numbers are down - and I think I see the point you are making. He started "slow" last year also.

That's not the point he's getting at at all, really. It's just the fact that Soriano has been terribly unlucky when it comes to balls in play actually dropping in for hits - thus causing the pathetic numbers early.

 

Isn't his point basically that Soriano's numbers don't really indicate how well he is hitting the ball, and that it will level out?