Miggy Wants the Ball Back
Just because I thought it was hilarious, let’s start with
Tuesday night when Miguel Cabrera broke a 0-22 streak by singling off of the
Royals’ Bruce Chen. After the hit, Miggy
asked for the ball. Guess he must have
really been scuffling.
Diamonds in the Rough
Ian Kinsler and Mike Napoli are ridiculous. I was doing a little research last night to
find some diamonds in the rough for the fantasy team and went to Fangraphs to
use their amazing search tools to see who might be flying under the radar. I’ll explain the process for those interested
but if you don’t give a duce then skip the following paragraph.
As always, we like our fantasy players to play so I set
the minimum plate appearances to 40 and then searched BABIP (batting average of
balls in play) to sort as worst to first.
I was hoping to find some players who have been getting “unlucky” with
hits but maintain production in hopes that said player would soon experience a
jump in batting average. I used wRC+
which basically takes a nerd version of OBP (wOBA) and factors in parks and what
league one plays in to give you a number.
The league averge is 100 so anything over 100 is good and anything under
100 is bad. I limited the count to
anyone with a BABIP under .260 which gave us 59 players to look at. I cut the wRC+ off at 110 as well.
There were a lot of interesting names on the list which
seem like they are playing well even though they may have been unlucky over
their first 40+ plate appearances. This
list includes:
BABIP wRC+
Miguel Cabrera .257 121
Miguel Cabrera .257 121
Dustin Pedroia .256
133
Brendan Ryan .250
117
Mike Napoli .250 171
Ian Kinsler .244 170
Alejandro De Aza .242
139
Dexter Fowler .240
112
Jose Bautista .219
113
Aaron Hill .188
119
It is an interesting list but what really jumped out at
me was the wRC+ of Kinsler and Napoli.
While maintaining a BABIP of below .250 they are both in the top 25 of
wRC+ (min 40 plate appearances). No other player has a BABIP below .290 in
these top 25 players. I’ll take a further
look at both players.
Ian Kinsler
Kinsler’s career BABIP is .282 which would mean that one would
expect to see more hits out of him in the future with his current BABIP being
at .244. However, in 2011 and 2009 he
had BABIP’s of .243 and .241 respectively.
It seems like his increase in wRC+ is most due to an increase in power. His ISO (a measure of power) is at an
incredible .375 compared to his career .196.
His line drive percentage is at 36.4% compared to a career mark of 19.5
percent. So it seemd like his BABIP
should but won’t necessarily increase while his ability to continue crushing
the ball will probably regress to the mean a bit. Where I originally thought Kinsler was an
example of a player ready for a breakout, it seems like he has been playing a
bit over his skis.
Mike Napoli
Napoli’s career BABIP is .303 and the lowest marks of his
career came in at .279 in 2010 and .276 in 2006 (99 games) when he was with the
Angels (currently at .250). Like
Kinsler, his ISO is a superb .394 but just last year he had an ISO of
.312. His line drive percentage is at a sustainable
20.8% which is pretty close to his career mark of 18.4%. He seems to be walking and striking out at
similar rates to his career (K% - 25% to 24.5% & BB% 10% to 11.6%). Going in I thought Kinsler would be the one
who would prove to be the good buy but it looks like Napoli might be more
likely to continue and possibly even improve on his torrid pace. The one downside is that he seems to be
hitting far more fly balls compared to ground balls so one would expect Napoli
to hit more ground balls but with a depressed BABIP, could we conclude that he
may see more of those ground balls sneak through for hits? Probably not but the sustainability of the
rest of his numbers makes Mike Napoli look like he might improve on last season’s
career year.
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