Todd Frazier hasn’t been exactly what the White Sox hoped when they traded a slew of prospects for him in the offseason. I mean, yeah, he’s got a share of the MLB home run lead with 21, but everything else has been out of whack. Despite those 21 home runs, Frazier’s actually barely been a league-average hitter, a .201 batting average being the key contributor to a pedestrian 104 wRC+. The stellar base-running Frazier displayed in 2014 has been absent. Any defensive metric suggests Frazier’s once-solid defense has gone into a spiral this year. Frazier’s essentially been an all-or-nothing home run machine, which has amounted to just 0.7 WAR for the year.

You look at the home runs, and you see the potential, but then you look at the mediocre overall batting line, and your eye is drawn to the batting average, because it’s the only thing that’s out of whack. Just .201. Frazier’s not striking out much more than usual, so you look to the BABIP, and you see… .182. Todd Frazier has a .182 batting average on balls in play this year, the lowest in baseball by more than 30 points. Excellent! Regression is near! That’s how BABIP works, right?

Well, yeah, kind of. Frazier will finish the year with a BABIP higher than .182, because surely he’s had some misfortune, but you don’t misfortune yourself all the way to a sub-.200 BABIP almost halfway through the year. More than anything, this is on Frazier.

The first thing to point out is that high home run hitters are already susceptible to lower BABIPs, because home runs don’t technically count as “balls in play,” and home runs are literally almost half of Frazier’s hits this year. But there’s a couple things bigger than that. The biggest one is this:

Frazier’s popped up 22 times this year. More than one of every 10 Frazier balls in play has gone for a pop-up, the highest rate in baseball by a considerable margin. Unsurprisingly, Frazier’s gone hitless on these pop-ups, because this doesn’t turn into a hit very often:

A pop-up is as good as a strikeout, which means you could view Frazier’s 23% strikeout rate really as more like a 30% strikeout rate.

Beyond the obscene number of pop-outs is Frazier’s changing ground ball tendencies. He doesn’t hit a ton of grounders, but he’s been pulling them more than ever…

…and as a result, the rate of shifts he’s seen has tripled. Without great speed or an even distribution of batted balls, Frazier’s hit just .125 on grounders this year and has been the worst ground ball hitter in baseball aside from Prince Fielder.

These are the kinds of things you look for when you check to see if an extreme BABIP is legit. Will Frazier’s .182 mark come up? Yep. But it won’t come up substantially, so long as he keeps hitting pop-ups and grounders into the shift.