Around the Mission: 10/5 Padres Links

I was referring to his 2010 production as a Cardinal, I wasn’t going back to 2008.

With BABIP for hitters, you have to go past just comparing it to the average. Unlike for pitchers, hitter BABIP isn’t all or even mostly luck, it’s also a function of how well they hit the ball. Research shows that while pitchers can’t control what happens to balls that get put in play against them, players can demonstrate a repeatable ability to hit the ball hard. This manifests mostly in Line Drive rate (LD%). If you want to try and separate luck from skill in the batter’s BABIP, you have to look at their batted ball profile (line drives, fly balls, ground balls, etc) and figure out what their BABIP “should” have looked like (xBABIP, or expected BABIP).

Ryan Ludwick’s xBABIP with the Padres was .320. Based on the number of line drives, ground balls, and fly balls he hit, he should have seen about 32% of his balls in play fall in for hits. Instead it was a crazy low .257. What was his BABIP with the Cardinals in 2010? .325.

It’s unfair to expect Ryan to repeat 2008. That was probably his career year. But it’s not unfair to expect him to be an above average hitter, which is what he was for the Cardinals in 2010. He’s not going to hit as many home runs, because the ballparks are smaller in the NL West than in the NL Central, and we saw that as his HR/FB rate dropped from 10.5% to 9.4%. But he was still hitting the ball hard, even more so than with the Cardinals, and he was even walking more with us than he did with St. Louis.

I’m not going to say he didn’t struggle, which he clearly did at times, and he’s admitted as much himself. But the numbers show us that he was also the victim of plenty of bad luck.