Win a Free Copy of THT 2015!

Have you heard? The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2015 is now available for sale. You can check out the table of contents and read some excerpts from the book. When you finish that you can purchase it from our independent publishing platform, Createspace, in print form, or from Amazon in print or Kindle form.

But wait, there’s more! Because we’re giving folk, and since it’s the beginning of the holiday season and all, we want to give you a chance to win yourself a free copy of the book. So today and tomorrow (and yesterday), we’ll be running a trivia contest based on one of the articles in the book. The first person to post the correct answer in the comments will win a free physical copy of the book (sorry, no free Kindle version). It’s just that simple!

Today’s question comes to us from Chris St. John’s article entitled “Not All Fly Balls Are Created Equal.” In it, Chris developed a metric for the expected run value (xRV) of fly balls. A bit of explanation:

For example, say a ball is hit 400 feet to straight center and hangs in the air for 5.3 seconds. Of the balls hit with this trajectory and using the ranges given above, there were one error, 46 fly outs, 16 doubles, nine triples and 12 home runs. Using the run value for each, the expected run value (xRV) for this trajectory is 0.72.

Chris breaks down the trends, as well as the leaders and laggards for average xRV from 2012-2014. We’ll focus on the latter today. The question before you today then, dear reader, is this:

Can you name three of the bottom five players in average xRV from 2012 through 2014?

Keep in mind that you’re looking for players who have played with some regularity.

Good luck!