Quote:
Originally Posted by DougWyatt
What I can't grasp about DIPS is this. Shouldn't the theory go both ways ? What I mean is, saying a pitcher doesn't control BABIP and that once contact is made, it's random whether or not it's a hit ... shouldn't this apply to hitters as well ?
I mean, if you take 2 guys that strikeout & homer at the same rate ... how (using DIPS) can one be a perenial .300 hitter and one be a perenial .220 hitter ?
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It's not random with hitters. For one thing, hitters have one skill in particular that can turn groundballs and line drives into base hits that they do have direct control over: speed. Faster players tend to have better BABIPs than slower players do. For similar reasons, younger players tend to have better BABIPs than older ones do. I know that the TangoTiger studies that were used to help map the BABIP skill in this version of the game show a general trend towards starting high and ending low.
Also, BABIP for hitters is very, very noisy as well. It's not quite as pronounced as pitcher DIPS, where a player who finishes in the top 5 in the league one season is nearly as likely to finish in the bottom 5 the next as he is in the top 5 again, but the year-to-year correlations are not anywhere near as strong as, say, batter strikeout rate or walk rate.
Beyond that... hitting is a different skill than pitching is. A vastly different skill, actually, so different that pitchers are very rarely good hitters and vice versa (at least above the high school level). This is an important point to bear in mind. Just because a pitcher on a gestalt level cannot control his BABIP does not mean that a hitter is unable to do so. For a pitcher, all those low-BABIP and high-BABIP guys even themselves out, creating the illusion of near-complete randomness on his part.