I’ve been a BP reader for three years and I missed that piece. Good stuff.

But I think it shows we were both right.

I can accept that you were being overly dramatic in your original “100″ statement…the conclusion of the BP article doesn’t go that far.

If you take 100% of the Reds’ strikeouts from 2004 and make them flyball outs, they get 1,335 X .03 = 40 more runs.

40 more runs is a lot! No one at BP would argue it isn’t.

But this is a hypothetical and as the article correctly states, you can’t just trade strikeouts for flyball outs without also trading in some power and walks, too. But I’m saying if you could swap out, you would. It’s simply not true that there’s no extra value whatsoever.

Hypothetically speaking, the Cubs’ 1080 strikeouts could have been worth about 3 more wins had they been balls in play. And that’s how many games they were out of the wildcard spot. And Sammy Sosa would still be out there in right field, too! Hahaha.

Thanks for the conversation.

See this article at Baseball Prospectus. There’s been a ton of other work on the subject as well. In case you’re not a subscriber, here’s the concluding paragraph.

On a very rough scale, a strikeout costs a team about three one-hundredth of a run. Looking at team totals from 2004, Reds batters led the league in strikeouts with 1,335 while the Giants trailed with 874, a difference of 461 whiffs. All those failures at the plate cost the Reds an estimated 13.6 runs over the course of the season, or just over one win. With individual batters who accumulated at least 600 plate appearances, Adam Dunn led the league with a well-publicized 195 strikeouts while Juan Pierre trailed with a mere 35. The 160 strikeouts–the most extreme case in the majors–add up to a difference of 4.7 runs.

So, basically, yes, the possibility of a double play essentially cancels out the value of moving runners.

“The point is that they wouldn’t be any more valuable if they turned 100 % of their strikeouts into other types of outs.”

Is that really true? My take is more moderate: that strikeouts aren’t as bad as some people think, but they’re still not as good as ball-in-play outs.

On a strikeout the only way for baserunners to advance is if it’s a wild pitch or passed ball. With a ball-in-play out, the baserunners have a much better chance to advance. Is this plus totally negated by the possibility of a double play? I doubt it.

Batter’s BABIP and hitters BABIP are two different statistics. A pitchers BABIP is recorded across a large cross section of hitters, some good and some not so good. In the end, it becomes a measurement against league average.

If a certain pitcher, however, faced only Barry Bonds, Albert Pujols, and Ichiro!, his BABIP against would likely increase. The BABIPs for Bonds, Pujols, and Ichiro!, however, probably would not change.

Yes.

So I asked about BABIP for hitters. Ah, but crunching the numbers implies that hitters do have a significant impact on BABIP. It’s not just all luck for them.

Yes.

So, I guess they haven’t been weeded out as heavily. There must be significantly more bad hitters in the league than bad pitchers, because we haven’t reached the point where all the hitters with bad BABIP skills have been left behind in the minors.

No. You make a huge jump here for absolutely no reason.

The balls in play theory states that pitchers don’t have a significant influence on whether a ball in play turns into an out or not. Because a ball in play is a confluence of skill between the pitcher and hitter, it logically follows that a hitter would then exert a significant amount of control over whether a ball in play becomes an out. If neither the pitcher or the hitter showed any ability to control the result, then all that would be left is random variation, and thats an illogical conclusion. And one unsupported by evidence.

The fatal flaw in the BABIP conversation (And I’ve been following it since McCracken published his article) is that the elimination of home runs from ‘in play’ is totally arbitrary and pointless.

The flaw in your logic here is that you are confusing measurement and interpretations.

BABIP is a measurement, and in compiling those we can also measure the degree to which BABIP correlates from yeaer to year. That measurements shows there is little correlation in BABIP from year to year. Those are empiric facts; they are comparable to sticking a thermometer outside your door and measuring the diurnal temperature variation every day. Then you can compile years of data and measure whether the average diurnal variation in June of 2004 is higher or lower than the diurnal variaion in June of 2003.

Home run rates and strikeout rates are also measurements. Unlike BABIP, when we meaure them across several seasons, we do note that there is some correlation; a pitcher who has a high career home run rate is likely to have a high homerun rate in the next season. Same thing for strikeouts.

The conclusion that many people draw from that is BABIP is relatively little influenced by what pitcher happens to be on the mound, but homerun rates and strikeout rates are much more influenced by who happens to be pitching. I think those are direct and straightforward conclusions, but feel free to disagree – as you certainly do.

But if you do disagree with that conclusion, you need to come up with an alternate explanation for those empiric facts.

The case for pitchers have little control over BABIP is out there. What’s your explanation for how pitchers have significant control over BABIP, but yet are unable to consistently express that ability from year to year?

Not a bizarre conclusion at all – it follows logically from the theory.

Here’s what Steve said (and Derek supported):

The measured BABIP is the sum of the pitchers skill component and a random flucuation component. As low skilled pitchers are weeded out, the luck factor becomes increasingly dominant. The weeding out continues to a point where the luck factor dominates skill effects; at that point the marginal returns from further controlling BABIP diminish greatly.

So, ML pitchers have limited influence (compared to one another) over BABIP because, well, they’re already so darned good at it. Any pitcher who didn’t have very good BABIP skills would be left in the minors.

So I asked about BABIP for hitters. Ah, but crunching the numbers implies that hitters do have a significant impact on BABIP. It’s not just all luck for them. So, I guess they haven’t been weeded out as heavily. There must be significantly more bad hitters in the league than bad pitchers, because we haven’t reached the point where all the hitters with bad BABIP skills have been left behind in the minors.

Of course, that is a bizarre conclusion, but don’t blame me, I just asked the (leading) questions.

Personally, I think Sidereal is onto something. To make an arbitrary distinction between a 410 ft HR and a 390 ft out leaves the whole BABIP theory on shaky ground.