This morning, RJ took a look at the ridiculously high BABIP belonging to David Wright, noting that nobody since 1954, with 300+ AB has ever exceeded .408, let alone .450 or .460. Though hitters tend to exert more influence over their BABIP than pitchers, not necessarily falling prey to the standard regression to .300, it is less likely for a hitter to post a .450+ BABIP than it is for Adam Eaton to pull a Johnny Vander Meer. One of the primary culprits of Wright’s BIP success is an otherworldly batting average on groundballs.

To date, Wright has a .471 BA on grounders. The league average is right around .240 over the last several seasons. Wright has essentially doubled that mark so far, recording hits on almost half of his grounded balls. Over the last few seasons, his GB% has held relatively steady with raw numbers in the 180-210 range. Given that his current pace falls in line with past results, a query for his contemporaries will stipulate a minimum of 160 groundballs.

Of those with 160+ GB from 2003-08, here are the highest GB-BAs:

Willy Taveras    2007  .413
Ichiro Suzuki    2007  .379
Norris Hopper    2007  .364
Akinori Iwamura  2007  .361
Carlos Gomez     2008  .359

Only one player with as many grounders as Wright has bested a .400 BA and only eight others have even exceeded .350. Suffice to say, Wright is currently in uncharted territory. There is no way he will sustain his seasonal line, but even with a severe regression, Wright is on par for an historical season in a few different areas.

Most of the players atop this groundball success leaderboard are speedsters, the guys known more for stealing bases than mashing longballs. Ironically, and somewhat comically, with his current tally of both steals and home runs, as well as his high BA on grounders, Wright has been performing more like the theoretical leadoff hitter than the powerhouse corner infielder we have come to expect.

Kevin Youkilis? Evan Longoria? Mark Teixeira? All fair guesses and all up there, but the top spot belongs to Ben Zobrist. Ben Zobrist? What? Yeah Zobrist is riding a 15% walk rate and 0.351 ISO to the top of the list.

The walk rate is not totally unexpected. Last year it was over 11% and he has always had great walk numbers in the minors. His O-swing, Z-swing and contact numbers are all very good, but about where they were last year. So why the 4% jump in walk rate? Well he is seeing about 4% fewer pitches in the zone. Since he is so good at not swinging at those pitches his walk rate has jumped.

Why fewer pitches in the zone you ask? It probably has something to do with last year’s power surge, which has carried over to this year. The power is a surprise. He never hit over 10 HRs in any year in the minors, but then last year he hit 12 HRs in 227 PAs with a 17.4% HR/FB. This year he has hit 15 in 225 PAs with a 24.2% HR/FB.

The gameday fly ball distances back up the change, as his average fly ball went from 252 ft. and 253 ft. in 2006 and 2007 to 278 ft. and 290 ft. in 2008 and 2009. Zobrist is a switch hitter and although he has slightly more power as a lefty, he gets considerable power from both sides of the plate; his HR/FB rate this year is above 20% from both sides of the plate. His GB% and IFFB% have both decreased every year since 2006 adding to his power.

Zobrist isn’t the best hitter in the AL going forward, and he might not continue to hit just under a quarter of his fly balls for home runs. Still he is a very good hitter and one of a number great young players on the Rays.

As you’ve probably heard, the Colorado Rockies have gotten hot lately, surging to a 37-34 record after starting the year as one of the worst teams in baseball. New manager Jim Tracy has been given a significant amount of the credit, as the team started winning right after he took over from Clint Hurdle, but there’s one really obvious reason why the Rockies are winning that has nothing to do with Jim Tracy – Troy Tulowitzki has been the best hitter in baseball this month.

After some pedestrian performances in April and May on the heels of a 2008 season that was one long struggle, questions about TT’s ability to hit began to gain momentum. Was he just a product of Coors Field? A flash in the pan who peaked early? A good glove that can only hit mistake pitches?

No, no, and no. After hitting two more home runs last night, Tulowitzki is hitting .373/.466/.797 in June, and only Albert Pujols has hit more home runs this month. His .508 wOBA since the end of May is the best in baseball. When you’re getting this much offense from the shortstop position, it’s going to make it pretty easy to put runs on the board and win some ballgames.

Tulowitzki has raised his entire offensive game this year. His walk rate is up to 13.8%, well above his previous career high of 9.4%, thanks to a more patient approach that has him swinging at less pitches out of the strike zone. Despite shifting to a more walks-and-power offensive attack, his contact rate is actually at a career high as well. That’s an impressive combination.

Despite a slow start, Tulowitzki has already racked up a +1.7 win value for the season, and is re-establishing himself as one of the better players in the game. His success in June is the main reason that Colorado has turned the corner and started playing well. Sorry, Jim Tracy, but at least you get to go along for the ride.

Winning a big league job this year was well within Max Ramirez’s reach, despite the fact that he found himself behind Jarrod Saltalamacchia and Taylor Teagarden on the Rangers’ depth chart. He looked to be even more prepared for a big league gig after smacking 15 homers in the Venezuelan Winter League before the season. No, he’s not the defensive catcher Teagarden is, in fact far from it. And no, he’s never been the centerpiece of a headline trade as Salty has, not unless you consider being traded for Bob Wickman or a 40-year old Kenny Lofton a blockbuster deal. What Ramirez is, or was supposed to be, was the best pure-hitter out of the three and that was his stake on the Rangers’ catching job.

Well, at least that as his claim. I fully realize that it is only mid-June, but since getting the call up to AAA Oklahoma City, Ramirez’s plate discipline has gone completely kerflooey.

While it’s not unusual to see Ramirez strike out, he’s really found himself in dangerous territory as of late, striking out in a third of his plate appearances. What really sticks out like a sore thumb is the big decrease in his walk rate. Ramirez hasn’t had a wOBA under .400 over a full season in his minor league career, but currently is among the bottom of the Pacific Coast League pack with a wOBA of just .282.

With the Salty/Teagarden platoon equaling just .6 WAR to this point, and Chris Davis melting like a Popsicle in the hot Texas sun, Ramirez picked a real bad time to hit the skids. Tools don’t just evaporate for a 24-year old hitter, but Ramirez needs to find his bearings soon. For someone whose bat was supposed to give him an opportunity to play, and now with surprisingly ample opportunity in Arlington, Ramirez finds himself on the outside looking in.

David Wright has a batting average on balls in play of .467 through 300 plate appearances. That’s right, nearly half of the balls Wright puts into play are turning into hits. As such, Wright has a batting line of .349/.438/.502 because he is striking out more than normal. A lot of debate has raged on sites like Amazin’ Avenue over whether Wright can replicate this BABIP moving forward.

Short answer: no.

Observe Wright’s BABIP by batted ball type over the last few years, provided by Baseball-Reference:

2009 2008 2007 2006
GB 0.471 0.257 0.262 0.253
FB 0.234 0.129 0.184 0.180
LD 0.740 0.683 0.731 0.856

The glaring difference between this year and those of the past is Wright’s ability to turn ground balls into hits. Wright is a very good player, but we still must consider that he is a major league ballplayer. So far this season, major league hitters have a BABIP on ground balls of just above .230. Wright has usually hit above that, but not by some .200 points.

I ran a query through my database for the highest BABIP with 300+ at-bats, and the best I came up with is Reggie Jefferson’s 1996 (.408), Rod Carew’s 1977 (.408), and Jose Hernandez’ 2002 (.405). A couple of others topped .400, but the highest of highs is just shy of .410. Nobody comes near .420, or .450, or .470.

This isn’t to say Wright’s BABIP is going to regress to .350 this season. ZiPS projects Wright’s BABIP finishing at .405, a total that seems reasonable for both sides of the argument. Wright would have a historically high BABIP, but not overly so.

Yes, Wright is a fantastic hitter capable of finishing with an above average BABIP, as he has showed in the past, but no, his BABIP is ridiculously unsustainable. Major league hitters do not see nearly 50% of their batted balls go for hits over the length of a season. They just don’t.

Last year, I posed a pretty interesting question to readers that I had heard on a generic sports radio station while driving, essentially wondering what type of team fans would prefer to root for or call their own. Only two choices were given and we got a slew of fantastic responses. The question, ultimately, is whether you would prefer to root for a team that would consistently win between 83-93 games over an eight-year stretch, making the playoffs quite a bit but never winning a championship, or a team that would win 1-2 championships in that same timespan but stink in the other 6-7 seasons, winning 72 or fewer games?

Really, this boils down to how much emphasis we place on both the regular season and the playoffs. Your fair weather fan or Average Joe is unlikely to care much about the regular season, making his answer obvious, but the more dedicated fans will often view 140+ games in a season. Heck, I know I’ve watched 95% of the Phillies games since 1999 and a slightly lower percentage the few post-strike seasons prior. It is very difficult to watch that many games for a crappy team while simultaneously staying interested. I know I sure struggled when the Phillies were throwing out Mike Grace, Carlton Loewer and Garret Stephenson.

My perspective on this question has shifted since a year ago, given the World Series title won by the Phillies last season. Back then, I was unsure of my answer, leaning towards the championship side strictly because I was yet to experience a championship in any sport. Having experienced it, though, without suggesting in any way that the feeling was less than great, I am now leaning towards the regular season team. I really do feel that watching a team with a .550+ winning percentage on a nightly basis, given how much I dedicate to the sport, would be my preference. The regular season lasts six months. The playoffs last about three weeks.

As important as those October games are, I love the grind of a regular season and being able to watch, and enjoy, games each night. If my team lost all the time, I fear that, even with my level of dedication, I might tune into other channels as the 6th and 7th innings rolled around. Then again, Braves fans can attest to the fact that winning all the time but failing in the playoffs can grow tiresome, which throws another wrench into these gears. Regardless, I’ll pose the question once more: do you care more about the regular season or the post-season? And would you prefer a team that wins 2 championships but goes 72-90 or worse in the other six seasons, or one that averages, say, 86-76 over that stretch, making the playoffs most of the seasons but never winning it all?

As you may have noticed, two new writers joined the site today. Erik Manning shocked everyone by writing about a member of the St. Louis Cardinals, while Dave Allen tackled the fly ball depth of David Ortiz. We’re all thrilled to have these two on board, and while I’m just a dude who writes here, I’m pretty proud of what the site has become. These two just keep adding to the awesomeness that is FanGraphs. Even if David fired me tomorrow, I’d still be a fan.

Anyway, I didn’t mention those two articles just to suck up to the new guys. Instead, I wanted to build off of Other Dave’s topic about Ortiz. During his disastrous run in April and May, you could walk around any city in America and run into someone proclaiming that David Ortiz was washed up. The bat speed was gone. He was off the juice. His weight caught up with him. He lied about his age. The theories were almost as numerous as the people spouting them, but the conclusion was all the same – Ortiz was finished.

Of course, he wasn’t actually finished. He was just about to start hitting like the David Ortiz of old, in fact (he’s at .308/.400/.654 in June, by the way). Despite what everyone saw, said, and agreed upon, Ortiz was on the verge of a big performance spike.

This isn’t an isolated incident, either. Last year, I was one of many who wrote off Carlos Delgado when he started the year hitting like a middle infielder. Right after we all declared him too old to play, he started hitting like an MVP candidate again. The Tigers cut Gary Sheffield because he looked done in spring training, and he’s been one of the Mets best hitters this year. Jason Giambi hit .208/.342/.379 in 2004, then led the American League in on base percentage in 2005. Scott Spiezio was released by the Mariners in 2005 because he was 3 for 47 and looked as bad as anyone ever has, then proceeded to post an .862 OPS for the Cardinals in 2006.

We could go on and on. The list of guys who have been written off as over the hill and then shoved that right back in everyone’s face is long and distinguished. You would think that eventually, we’d learn our lesson. There may be a point at which a major league player just loses enough of his ability to stop being productive, but we suck at figuring out when that point is. We’re so bad at it that we should just stop trying.

We haven’t figured out what numbers show that a player is truly washed up. We haven’t figured out what it looks like when that happens. We haven’t figured out how to combine scouting and statistical analysis to give us a warning before a player heads off the cliff. All we’ve figured out is how to guess wrong a lot. Young player struggle, old players struggle, middle age players struggle, and we don’t have any good way of figuring out why in most cases. Just because a player experiences a drop in performance, and is old, does not mean that age related decline is the reason for the performance. More often than not, it’s just bad luck.

Let’s stop pretending that we can identify players who have “just lost it” overnight. Too often, they find it again the next morning.

Over the last week, we’ve been looking at sophomore players in the Major Leagues. Today’s post is looking at the National League East division, which was fairly barren in terms of rookies in 2008 although the Braves organization had its fair share of newbies.

In the past few days, we have looked at the: AL Central, AL West, AL East and NL Central.

Perhaps buoyed by the mass of ever-present media, fielder Daniel Murphy entered 2009 with quite a bit of hype after just 188 at-bats during the ’08 season. Last year, he hit .313/.397/.473 with rates of 12.1 BB% and 21.4 K%. Murphy hit just two homers (.160 ISO) and did not successfully steal a base in two attempts. Perhaps the biggest negative with the left-handed hitter is his lack of position. Originally an infielder, Murphy’s penchant for errors led to a move to the outfield, where he spent all of 2008 while in the Majors. This season, he’s split his time between left field and first base. His 2009 line of .250/.324/.362 is below average for both positions, as is his ISO at .112.

Martin Prado bounced between the Majors and triple-A during both the 2006 and 2007 seasons. He spent the majority of the 2008 season with Atlanta and had an above-average offensive season for a utility player by hitting .320/.377/.461 with 18 doubles and three steals in 228 at-bats. His rates were also pretty good at 8.4 BB% and 12.7 K%. This season, the infielder is hitting .277/.344/.445 with 11 doubles and no steals in 119 at-bats. Both his plate rates have improved by a percent or two. The downside, much like with Murphy above, is that Prado has been used mostly at a position that traditionally produces power (third base and first base). If he spent more time at second base – or shortstop – he would have greater value to the Braves, assuming he can play at least average defense at those positions.

Desperate for some outfield help in 2008, the Braves organization ran through a number of outfielders with “fourth outfielder” labels hovering over them and not one of the three players has done much to dispute that impending title. Josh Anderson, Gregor Blanco and Brandon Jones have all seen their playing time with the Braves decrease, even though the club still needs outfield depth. In fact, Anderson was traded out of the organization to Detroit earlier this year. Blanco showed the ability to get on base last season but he did it with almost no power. The 25-year-old outfielder hit .251/.366/.309 with 19 extra base hits and 13 steals in 430 at-bats. This season, he’s spent the majority of the year in triple-A. Jones hit .267/.312/.397 with one homer and a single steal in 116 at-bats. His rates of 5.7 BB% and 24.1 K% suggested more work needed to be done. Like Blanco, Jones has spent most of 2009 in triple-A.

Stolen from the Tigers in a trade after the 2007 season, right-hander Jair Jurrjens has been a very good pitcher for the Braves. Jurrjens posted a 3.68 ERA (3.59 FIP) in 2008 with 188 hits allowed in 188.1 innings of work. He also had a walk rate of 3.35 BB/9 and a strikeout rate of 6.64 K/9. His ground-ball rate was 51.2%. This season, Jurrjens has allowed 81 hits in 87.1 innings of work, along with an ERA of 2.89 (3.52 FIP). His rates are very similar, although his ground-ball percentage has dropped to just 39.5%.

Reliever Manny Acosta allowed 48 hits in 53.0 IP but posted disappointing rates of 4.42 BB/9 and 5.26 K/9. He’s pitching in just nine MLB games in 2009 with eight hits allowed in 11.2 innings. He’s also shown similar rates, which is disappointing considering his fastball averages out at 93 mph.

Emilio Bonifacio had a very nice first month of the 2009 season, but that has been sandwiched by about six months worth of below-average play. Based on his offensive skill set, the 24-year-old infielder is best suited to play second base, but he’s spent the majority of the 2009 season at third base, where he has hit .241/.288/.292, which is well-below-average for a third base (and even for a second baseman). He’s also stolen just 12 bases in 17 attempts and has a walk rate of 6.5 BB%. Last year, Bonifacio hit .243/.296/.337 with seven steals in 11 attempts. Sadly, he’s not even a stellar defensive player.

John Baker, 28, toiled in the minors for seven seasons before earning his shot in 2008 and he hit .299/.392/.447 with five homers in 197 at-bats. The catcher also showed OK patience at the plate with a walk rate of 13.2 BB%. This season, Baker has struggled to hit for average with a line of .245/.335/.411 and six homers in 163 at-bats. His ground-ball rate is probably a little high at 56.3% for a plodding catcher.

The ground-ball pitcher that is Chris Volstad had a very nice debut season in 2008. The right-hander quieted the critics who said he was not ready by posting a 2.88 ERA (3.82 FIP) with 76 hits in 84.1 innings of work. He posted a walk rate of 3.84 BB/9 and a strikeout rate of 5.55 K/9 but allowed just three homers (0.32 HR/9). It’s the missing quality sinker that has hurt Volstad in 2009. He’s given up 88 hits in 89.1 innings, including 14 long balls (1.41 HR/9).

Southpaw John Lannan, 24, doesn’t get a lot of love even though he keeps putting up the results – and for a bad team. He had a 3.91 ERA (4.79 FIP) while allowing 172 hits in 182 innings in 2008. The left-hander also had rates of 3.56 BB/9 and 5.79, so he puts the ball in play a lot. In 2009, Lannan has a 3.38 ERA (5.09 FIP) with 82 hits allowed in 85.1 innings. His walk rate is very similar, but the strikeout has dropped to 4.43 BB/9.

Collin Balester, 23, has to be pretty disappointed. The right-hander made 15 starts in 2008 and allowed 92 hits in 80 innings of work. He also posted rates of 3.15 BB/9 and 5.63 K/9. Like Lannan, Balester also struggled with home runs and he allowed 12 homers (1.35 HR/9). This season, he’s made all 14 of his starts in triple-A, where he has a 4.00 ERA.

Steven Shell and Charlie Manning both pitched a good chunk of innings for the club in 2008, but neither player has seen much MLB playing time in 2008. The better of the two pitchers, Shell is a former Angels prospect, posted a 2.16 ERA in exactly 50 innings. He also had a 7.38 K/9 rate. In 2009, though, the right-hander fell apart. He appeared in four games for the Nationals before moving on to the Seattle organization, where he has a 7.90 ERA in 12 games. Manning appeared in 57 games in 2008 with an ERA of 5.17. He has yet to pitch in the Majors in ’09.

The Philadelphia Phillies organization did not distribute significant playing time to any rookies in 2008.

David Ortiz had a horrible start to the season, going the first month and a half (154 PAs) without a home run. But recently he has turned it around, hitting five home runs since June 6th. Does this mean that Ortiz’s power is back, or has the recent HR outburst been a small sample size fluke build on a couple lucky shots?

One way we can answer this question is head over to Greg Rybarczyk’s Hit Tracker and see if his HRs were lucky or not. This shows Ortiz tied for the league lead with three lucky HRs, not encouraging. Greg’s information is great (providing the most accurate data available on every aspect of HRs we could ask for), but it only provide data about Ortiz’s HRs and there is another half to luck, maybe Ortiz has hit a number of long fly balls that just barely didn’t go for HRs.

I wanted to see a complete picture of Ortiz’s power including all of his fly balls, so I needed to look elsewhere for the distance on his non-HR fly balls. Back on June 5th when Ortiz was seemingly still in his slump John Dewan presented the average distance of Ortiz’s balls in the air using the Baseball Info Solution (BIS) data. It showed a serious drop in his average distance compared to 2007 and 2008. Unfortunately the BIS data are not publicly available so I could not use them to look at his fly balls during his recent power surge.

Batted ball location data are publicly available through MLB’s Gameday. They report the location x and y coordinate of every batted ball in pixel units, which are displayed on the field images in the MLB Gameday application and then stored in XML format. Peter Jensen came up with translation factors to convert Gameday provided pixels to feet for each ball park. Unfortunately Jensen found that the conversion factors change year to year and you need a whole year of data to come up to determine the factors. So I am going to have to use Jensen’s 2008 conversion factors to look at Ortiz’s fly ball distances and hope that we are not that far off. Luckily I can use Dewan’s BIS data to see how close they are.

 David Ortiz ball in air average distance (feet)
+------------------+---------------+---------------+
| Year             |     BIS Dist. | Gameday Dist. | 
+------------------+---------------+---------------+
| 2007             |           290 |           291 |
| 2008             |           273 |           279 |
| 2009 pre-June 5  |           254 |           256 |
| 2009 post-June 5 |            NA |           300 |
+------------------+---------------+---------------+

For 2007 and 2008 I used the appropriate conversion factors from Jensen and the BIS and Gameday average distances are surprisingly close. It is really an endorsement of the quality of data from both BIS and Gameday, and Jensen’s conversion factors. For 2009 I had to used the 2008 factors on the 2009 data, and luckily the BIS and Gameday numbers came out very close. So I am fairly confident going forward with the 2008 conversion factors on the 2009 data.

If you trust the 2008 conversion factors on the 2009 data, over the past two weeks Ortiz’s balls in the air have averaged 300 ft, higher than in 2007 and 2008. That looks good.

Here are the distances of all of his balls in the air by date with the home runs filled in. The straight line is his average 2008 distance and the wavy line a smoothed rolling average of his 2009 distance.

You can see he started out a good 20 ft below his 2008 average, but starting around the end of May his average distance has raised steadily. This graph also shows that in the past couple weeks in addition to his six homers he has had a number of other long fly balls. This is a small sample, but things look qualitatively different for Ortiz since the end of May, an encouraging sign for him and the Red Sox.

Unless you’ve watched Seattle play quite a bit this year, odds are you don’t realize that David Aardsma has the highest WPA of any relief pitcher in the American League this season. Yes, David Aardsma – the guy who the Red Sox traded to the Mariners for the immortal Fabian Williamson over the winter.

Aardsma’s always been a guy with a big fastball and no command, as his career 5.56 BB/9 shows. He’s on his fifth organization in six years, as everyone has had him previously got tired of seeing him walk the world and decided to go another direction. He’s still walking everyone in sight as a Mariner, but he’s turned up the strikeouts and stopped giving up home runs, so the overall package has worked for him this year, delivering a 1.62 ERA while pitching in extremely high leverage situations.

This kind of breakout year has inspired a couple of people to ask me what Aardsma’s doing differently this year. I’ve told them the same thing – nothing obvious. He’s the same guy he’s always been, with the same skillset as always. He just was better than people realized.

For example, here are his 2009 numbers to date.

33 1/3 IP, 19 H, 20 BB, 41 K, 1 HR, 2.79 FIP, 1.62 ERA

And here’s his numbers last year through July 18th, when he was placed on the DL.

39 1/3 IP, 29 H, 26 BB, 41 K, 1 HR, 3.58 FIP, 2.75 ERA

Not a huge difference, honestly. The strikeouts are up a little bit, but not that much. The hits are down, but that’s what happens when you take an extreme flyball guy out of Fenway and put him in Safeco with some terrific defensive outfielders behind him. Overall, the core performance isn’t that much different from what he was last year before he got hurt. He tried to return in August, but he was a walking disaster – 9 1/3 IP, 20 H, 9 BB, 8 K, 3 HR, 9.52 FIP, 17.36 ERA

Trying to pitch while hurt didn’t do him any favors, ruining his 2008 season line and giving the impression that he was still unable to get major league hitters out. However, before landing on the DL, he was doing just fine. The command was bad, but the strikeouts and lack of home runs made it work. Just like now.

I’m not saying Aardsma is going to continue to post a 1.62 ERA all season. With as many fly balls as he gives up, he’s going to surrender a few more home runs along the way. But Aardsma’s a quality relief pitcher, and we shouldn’t be that surprised that he’s performing well for the Mariners. He did this last year too, but no one noticed.