Todd Frazier’s Batted Ball Problem
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:
| Name | Team | BABIP | LD% | GB% | FB% | PU | PU% |
| Todd Frazier | White Sox | .182 | 14.2% | 37.9% | 47.9% | 22 | 11.6% |
| Manny Machado | Orioles | .342 | 21.0% | 33.8% | 45.2% | 18 | 8.2% |
| Jose Bautista | Blue Jays | .239 | 18.1% | 39.4% | 42.6% | 15 | 8.0% |
| Maikel Franco | Phillies | .247 | 17.3% | 44.6% | 38.1% | 15 | 7.4% |
| Brett Lawrie | White Sox | .304 | 18.4% | 36.3% | 45.3% | 13 | 7.2% |
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.
August used to cover the Indians for MLB and ohio.com, but now he's here and thinks writing these in the third person is weird. So you can reach me on Twitter @AugustFG_ or e-mail at august.fagerstrom@fangraphs.com.
August + BABIP + Chicago baseball = early warning for comments from our favorite idiot.
I’m putting a six-pack on ice right now. Let the fun begin.
I’m putting a bomber of Straight Jacket in the fridge right now. Oh, is this not BeerGraphs?
Maybe I’m an idiot, but I don’t get the logic behind the idea that home run hitters have a disadvantage with BABIP because a higher proportion of their hits are home runs than other hitters. I don’t see the logical connection there. Can someone unpack this for me?
I mean, home runs are excluded from BABIP by definition… so I don’t see how they could possibly affect BABIP. Right? Wrong?
Two players go 3-for-10 with 0 strikeouts.
Player A has 3 singles. His BABIP is .300. (3/10)
Player B has 2 singles and 1 home run. His BABIP is .222. (2/9)
Basically, your hard hit balls that go out of the park are one less ball that was hit hard and stayed in the park.
Excuse me if I am only obfuscating but: as I understand it, BABIP is a measure of the percentage of balls which could be turned into an out or could be turned into a hit which in fact are turned into a hit. Balls which are struck into fair territory and which will either be a hit or an out depending on the velocity, angle and placement of the hit, and the opposing fielding quality of the opponent.
Originally it was meant (mostly) to filter out the “luck” element of the latter (as it affects the hitter), but it’s increasingly become shorthand for measuring the former–that is the “quality” of the contact.
A home run is never “in play.” A home run could never be an out. Home run hitters are not “punished.” That said, a home run is the very best “quality” of a hit, and so it can be deceptive to say, for instance, Todd Frazier is making poor contact–except for those 21 home runs.
Something in Frazier’s swing seems to be simultaneously producing home runs and pulled grounders. The former is top tier. The latter is torpedoing his batting average. It is clear that Frazier is not simply victim of circumstance. His own contributions to his batted ball profile are partly responsible for his low batting average: ie pop ups and grounders pulled into a shift. How much is not yet entirely clear. Nor is it clear if that batted ball profile will change. Et c.
I recognize this has no place in an internet dispute, but I thought I would check on what actually happens.
I checked BABIP’s this year for the top 30 HR hitters and ties, and ran them against the AL BABIP. (NL BABIP is lowered by pitchers.)
Result: AL BABIP is .300, top HR guys are .301.
Fluke? Let’s check 2015:
Last year, if I have it right, AL BABIP of .296, top HR guys at .299.
So I think August’s hypothesis that HR guys are susceptible to low BABIPs is mistaken. (Caveats: Still small sample size – 68 guys. No grouping of low HR guys. No filtering out AL pitchers who got some PA’s. May be methodology or math errors. But I think this conclusion is right. Maybe I should have Googled this before hitting post comment, but here we are.)
Well, under the condition that two players have equal batting averages, the one with more home runs is also likely to have the lower babip. Even this isn’t a guarantee, though, unless strikeout rates are also equal. If player A strikeouts out twice and player B strikes out four times, A’s .375 (3/8) babip is lower than B’s .400 (2/5).
It’s only under the conditions of equal batting average and equal strikeouts rate that HR-heavy players will necessarily have lower babips.
What do Frazier, Machado, Bautista, Franco and Lawrie all have in common? Its hard to understand what hitter attributes are causing pop ups.
And, by extension, pop outs shouldn’t be grouped with strikeouts. A strikeout is a repeatable failure–signalling a hitter’s deficit in ability. Pop outs are still incredibly noisy, as far as I understand, and should be treated as “bad luck” likely to work itself out through regression.
That is not accurate. Pop up rates are fairly consistent from year to year.
Did not know that. Thanks for the correction.
The pulling every ground ball thing is what surprises me – watching him the last several years in Cincinnati, he sprayed the ball around a lot and never got overly pull happy. That alone tells me something’s not right with his swing (I mean, a .182 BABIP does too. But still).
If the season ended today his BABIP would be the lowest of any qualified hitter ever!
Frazier shows an IFFB rate of 24.2% on the leaderboard, which also leads the league. How is this number different than your pop-up %? I count 31 pop-ups for Frazier including foul outs.
IFFB% is the percentage of fly balls that are popups.
Pop up rate is the percentage of all balls in play. I prefer PU% because of players like Billy Burns who run a high IFFB% but don’t actually hit that many pop-ups overall since they have a much lower percentage of fly-balls.