[knockahoma]

Hi, Ron.

I'll look for hitters BABIP at home and away. I was looking at a report on Oakland before you posted. The hitters in Oakland have consistently done better on the road. Pitchers did better at home. I'll try to hunt up the other numbers.

The immediate idea is that it's a pitcher's park. But the guy said that foul balls caught were only minimally better than the average ballpark (2.9% to 3.2% of outs, I think?). I'll have to go find it again. The guy said we didn't have to identify the cause, but just assume the pitcher's park worked for the Oakland pitchers. It always surprises me when they fail to even consider that pitchers just pitch better at home and it's reflected in BABIP. I suspect strongly that's because they feel a pitcher can't control his BABIP to that extent.

Jar:

The odds are very good that some pitcher, somewhere, would have consistent BABIP over four seasons.

What struck me is that I found stretches like that in probably half or more of the pitchers I looked at (mostly good pitchers). You can check it out on the OOTP historicals. When I get a chance, I'll post some team staffs.

That's what made me wonder what a stable pitcher's BABIP would be? In all our discussions, I don't remember reading that. Is it 10 points, 20 points? I'd think closer to the latter. And what's a "consistent" BABIP for hitters?

If anyone already knows the answer to that, I'd like to see it. Otherwise, I'll do some hunting.

If the data didn't support the conclusion that most pitchers cannot control BABIP most of the time, then BABIP would never have been controversial -- and we probably wouldn't be talking about it -- because it would have supported conventional wisdom.

The more I read the more I understand that's not "current wisdom". I believe I got this from Tango's Tiger's (?) site:

The reliability of any metric will increase as its sample size will increase. For a pitcher, seasonal BABIP is a largely unreliable measure of his skill. In order for this metric to do a good job in measuring his skill, you need several seasons worth of data.

This leads to the myth that a pitcher's skill in hit prevention is mostly the product of luck: we can't see year-to-year consistency in the metric as the noise overwhelms the signal. But, as we increase the number of years, the signal can finally match the noise.

For hitters, a seasonal BABIP is a bit more indicative in explaining his skill in getting hits: the year-to-year consistency is stronger for batters than for pitchers.

I do think it's worth noting that the BABIP controversy was out of the womb based on a two year study by McCracken. He figured pitchers had little, or no control over BABIP. Personally, I had a problem with McCracken's interpretation. Now, I don't have much of a problem at all with the issue, since now we agree a pitcher contributes to BABIP, but how much? I just want to know what the number is.

But, as an ex-player and fan, I would not expect a strongly consistent 15 year career in most players. If you look at batters, you can often see them go through 3 or 4 year swings. It's interesting to see how careers parse up. And in about half the pitchers I saw, there was this type of parsing. Yeah, large swings when you look at the entire career. But a surprising amount of consistency over periods of three, or four years. I'd be interested what people had to say about that.

We wouldn't be having this discussion if someone hadn't looked at what you're looking at.

I suspect that's true. But, I haven't read about it yet. So, I'd like to track it down.

I'll put up a team staff of pitchers and show you what I mean about stretches of consistency.