When I started researching this post, I was planning to write about the Giants are by design a groundball/line drive team and how advances in defensive positioning have taken their game away from them. Positioning may well be part of the problem, but my conclusion is that plain old fashioned luck played a bigger role. Here are the numbers:
Hitting:
2016: BABIP= .299. GB/FB= 1.38. LD%= 21.6. Soft%= 20.9. Med%= 50.7. Hard%= 29.0.
2017: BABIP= .280. GB/FB= 1.43. LD%= 19.2. Soft%= 21.3. Med%= 50.7. Hard%= 28.0.
Pitching:
2016: BABIP= .287. GB/FB= 1.30. LD%= 19.7. Soft%= 19.0. Med%= 51.3. Hard%= 29.7.
2017: BABIP= .320. GB/FB= 1.19. LD%= 22.2. Soft%= 19.2. Med%= 48.0. Hard%= 32.8.
So yes, Giants batters are hitting a few more groundballs and a few fewer LD's and Giants pitchers are giving up more flyballs and more LD's. Some of that may be by design as many MLB hitters are consciously trying to elevate the ball more and teams continue to shift more. So it is likely not all of this is purely due to luck, but the peripheral numbers do not explain the .019 drop in BABIP by the Giants AND the .033 jump in BABIP by opposing batters. Differences like that over a half season sample size are likely to be due to a massive case of bad BABIP luck. After all, teams did not just start shifting this year and the Giants did not just become a GB/LD team in one season. They've been that for a few years now.
So, if you watch game after game and think to yourself that the Giants are hitting a whole lot of balls right at defenders and opposing teams are finding a whole lot of holes in the defense and the luck has to turn sometime. Well, it looks like the numbers back you up. While injuries and poor play have undoubtedly contributed to the Giants first half faceplant, most of if is due to plain old fashioned bad luck.
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ReplyDeleteA healthy Belt typically has a BABIP just over .350. Last time I checked it was .260. He is the biggest BABIP drop on the team.
A healthy Crawford typically has a BABIP just over .300. Last time I checked it was .270.
Pence has dropped about .025 in BABIP. I'm not terribly surprised, he was one of the best infield hit batters in baseball. But as he's losing his legs, more those infield balls are now becoming outs.
However, it's not all bad.
A healthy Posey typically has a BABIP of .315, it's around .350 this year.
Hundley's BABIP is extremely erratic. At .318 he's over his career average. But the seasonal variation is huge. So...
Nunez, at .314 BABIP is the same as 2016 & 2015.
Span's career average is .316, but part of that was one huge year. His BABIP of .307 is really about his right BABIP. With Span, his walks are at a career low.
Panik has recovered about half his BABIP. It was in the .340 range in his first two years. .245 last year. He's a .294 right now. And there is reason to believe it will continue to rise as puts the May-from-Hell behind him.
One of the big things I see is how bad the bench/replacements have been. Whether we like it or not, there's a big, long list of bench/young players who have really not contributed as projected starters, spot starters or as injury replacements. And I think that is a big part of the BABIP drop problem despite what's going on with a few of the core starters.
Belt may be the one guy who is impacted the most by shifts, so unless he figures out how to elevate the ball more or go the other way more, his BABIP drop may be permanent. All others it's probably mostly luck. And yes, the bench has been horrible. Whether the chaos of spring training contributed to that or not is a matter of conjecture.
DeleteBelt and the Giants probably believe that the shift having an effect because he's trying to bunt down 3rd again. Until recently, I haven't seen him attempt bunting in a long time.
DeleteDoes BABIP take into account fielding? Does poor fielding result in higher BABIP for the other team?
ReplyDeleteAlso, the Giants' slide started 2nd half of last year. Did BABIP play into last year's slide, or was that just bad relief pitching? Hard for me to imagine that regression to normal BABIP will bring this team back into contention next year.
First of all, I have never said that BABiP luck is solely responsible for the Giants poor record this year, but it is undeniable that it has played a big role.
DeleteAs for defense, yes, defense plays a huge role in BABIP. By Fangraphs metrics the Giants rank 6'th in MLB In team defense this year and are giving up a .320 BABIP in spite of the excellent defense, which means that opposing hitters have been even luckier than that .320 BABIP implies.
As for what a normalizing BABIP would do for this team, the best estimates are that they would be approximately a .500 team with normalized BABIP's. Not in the playoffs but not nearly this bad.
You say "most of if is due to plain old fashioned bad luck"!
ReplyDeleteThat, this late in the year, is statistically about a .0001 chance, and the mathematicians have an expression for that. In technical terms, it is "next to nothing"!
It takes about 3 years for BABIP's to stabilize so it is, in fact, very likely that 1/2 season is heavily impacted by luck.
DeleteI think the problem has been twofold, the bullpen and the bench.
ReplyDeleteOn the bullpen, it is kind of a chicken and egg type of deal. What came first, the lack of talent in it when the core four left or Bochy's managing of it when it happened? He has seemed to struggle in managing it like he had in the past. Some of it is due to the lack of talent but also, I think, in him not making the adjustments sometimes. It's easier to manage when we had a pen like before but he needs to find his magic with lesser talent too.
The bench has just been too weak. I know Hernandez has been doing better of late, but to go into the season with him on the roster when you already had question marks with the regulars was not a good choice. They had to know that at some point he'd probably end up being more than just a 4th outfielder, like Blanco was, and he just didn't have the history to back it up. Hill was a disaster and that was pretty clear early on but Bochy gave him the benefit because he was a veteran. Then the myriad of other guys they tried to fill in all pretty much failed too.
Put this on top of losing Madbum and his leadership and anchoring the rotation and you have 2017.
Billy Baseball
Bochy didn't suddenly forget how to manage a bullpen. The bullpen problems are a talent issue and the BABIP luck thing.
DeleteAgree the Bench has been inadequate. I will have more to say on this in a later post.
interesting article on why the Giants might not be doing well. Says bullpen may be an issue and speaks to Bochy taking his eye off the ball and not adjusting by his own admission:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.foxsports.com/mlb/story/san-francisco-giants-find-nothing-is-routine-in-troubled-2017-season-062617
They say where there's smoke there's fire and there seems to be an awful lot of smoke coming from the Giants clubhouse these days from Cueto's comments this spring to Javier Lopez' on-air nicknames and now this.
DeleteHa! Now there's a theory that the reason the Giants clubhouse is fractured is because Angel Pagan is gone. How was he a unifier? All the rest of the players hated him!
DeleteI think it's nothing more than a classic 'narrative fallacy.' That is people link 'cause and effect' when there is none and create stories to justify it. There's a great, if old, article about it in The Scientific American:
Deletehttps://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/cognitive-biases-in-sports-the-irrationality-of-coaches-commentators-and-fans/
In short, the narrative fallacy is part of our irrational, yet very human, suite of tools that allows us to be create stories around our inability to accept randomness and luck. We must have a cause.
All that's going on is that a whole bunch of people on the team are playing badly and some of them are getting snake bit (Belt), while some are getting lucky (Posey) and others are in natural athletic decline (Pence) while with others, we can't tell yet (most of the bullpen) whether their problems are bad-luck now, or our expectations were inflated because of good-luck in the past (Osich, Law).
Totally off topic, but why did the Giants brig Hwang over from Korea where he blistered the ball and then bypass him for Ryder Jones who does not appear to be ready so far?
ReplyDeleteI find the Giants entire approach to Jae-Gyun Hwang to be downright baffling. Forget Ryder Jones. Why did they send Hwang down and keep Chris Marrero? Aaron Hill? Conor Gillaspie? It's going to be very interesting to see what happens as July 31 approaches, but right now I have to say it does not look like the Giants have any intention of bringing Hwang up before then.
DeleteI had the same question early in the season. But at this point I think they're doing the classic 'we may as well see' thing with the players who'll be under long-term control. Hwang's old enough that he's already on the down-curve as an athlete and he's on a one-year deal. If we were contending, perhaps he'd have been called up. But now there is little upside in bringing him up besides maybe winning a few extra games and worsening the draft position slightly.
DeleteBut the reality is the season is lost. So, as a GM, you start looking at players to check their 'can he do it' boxes to see if they're going to be part of the long-term. That includes promoting players you're not feeling very confident in, but 'just in case' you're going to check them out at a higher level.
The Mets just made one of those moves in promoting Tebow. He was terrible in A- yet he went to A. THey're not promoting him because he earned it. They're promoting him so they can make sure getting rid of him was the right decision. They may even promoted him to AA. (There is a side benefit, Tebow is extremely popular in the South. It helps the minor league clubs with their gate.)
Jae-gyun Hwang can opt out of his contract on July 1 if not brought to majors.
ReplyDelete