The modern career BABIP leader over a reasonable sample is Rod Carew at .359. The all-time leader is Ty Cobb at .378.

Its interesting that anyone would speculate that Trout is the greatest BABIPer ever based on a < 70g sample. Especially when there is a 40g sample last season you could also look at where his BABIP was .247.

Fair enough, I'm wrong here. Still though, Trout is amazing.

he could be a true talent .400 babip player. it's just extremely unlikely.

.400 is ridiculous but the way he's playing.... .350+ easy, and that's pretty fing ridiculous too.

a big part of the problem with projecting trout to have a really high babip is that he's not the ground ball machine most super high babip players are.

it's not impossible; votto for example has an extremely high career babip despite having similar gb/fb rates as trout. it just makes it harder.

Yep. I feel like people overrate speed as a BABIP factor over smaller samples. Most often, it's just a case of a guy hitting the ball really well. Avila had a stretch of .400 BABIP last year towards the end of the year like this because he was just crushing the ball and finding gaps. But it's something that is just extremely difficult to sustain over a long period of time. Trout is excellent, but I don't think anyone can hit the ball this consistently for multiple seasons.

This would be a really interesting post if we didn't have like ERA stats from every year and could track changes and note that Team ERA and # of complete games are not related.

Back when I used to play poker we called this "running hot."

if you're contending that league era would not have gone down back in the day if teams used relievers a lot more often then you are probably wrong. we already know the relationship between pitching deeper in to games and pitcher effectiveness. it's quite strong.

There's obviously some run good to it, but I don't think it's fair to just call it 100% running hot. When your timing is correct and you're hitting the ball how you want to, you're going to find gaps. I think there's too much skill involved to just call it running hot.

How far back does this relationship go?

I'm not contending that ERA would be lower today if teams kept starters in longer. However, for 5-7 year periods in the last 100 years League ERA has been both lower and higher than it's been since the advent of rigorous relief pitching. You're assuming that hitters benefit more from facing 4-man rotations deep into games than 5-man rotations and a smattering of relief pitchers (pitchers who tend to be failed starters anyway).

I mean, in the 1980s League ERA was much lower than the last decade. 5-man rotations in the 80s and limited relief pitching.

there is pretty much no way a batter can control the difference between hitting a line drive right at an outfielder and hitting one 20 feet to the left of an outfielder.

also you appear to be confused about "being in the zone" which may not exist and if it does has a negligible effect.

you know there are many many many variables that affect league era right?

and i'm not assuming anything. the effect is clear.

If you took a team's 6 best pitchers and had them pitch every inning they would burn out faster (especially today, many pitchers from eras past had relatively long careers regularly logging close to 300 IP/season) but I would expect their team ERA to be lower than ERAs in the current TLR-style relief barrage. I think that overcomes the effect you are speaking of.

I know there are lots of variables: one could be greater pitcher durability in the past than today. That reinforces my point.

I'm not saying any of this. I know the first part is true, what I'm saying is that when a guy is hitting the ball well, his BABIP is going to be higher even if it's not sustainable over a large sample size. If a batter's timing is right, he sees the ball well, etc., he's going to make more consistent contact and he's more likely to come up with hits on balls in play than a guy who isn't doing those things over the same sample.

And I said nothing about "being in the zone." That may or may not be true, but batters certainly do hit the ball more consistently over certain samples than others. I think Trout has done that this year and that his speed isn't necessarily the reason his BABIP is so high. I just don't think he can sustain that over multiple year long samples. He doesn't need to fall out of the "zone" for that to be true. He just won't be fortunate enough to hit the ball as consistently in the future.

We need hit/fx data to be sure but from what I saw of Trout, his BABIP is bat control+LD% driven. He was twisting his wrists with rather impossible timing to hit laser beams into the gap even when he guessed wrong.

Don't try to tell this to MJW. He thinks Adam Everett can hit the ball into the vacated position of a 2nd basemen on a hit and run on purpose.

see the problem is that you're completely wrong. again there is a very clear effect where the deeper a pitcher goes into the game, the less effective he is. a fresh average reliever will outperform a good starter who is at 100 pitches/on his 3rd or 4th time through the lineup.

in fact teams probably still don't use their relievers enough in modern mlb.

and i find it extremely hard to believe that pitchers were more durable 100 ****ing years ago when the player pool was far smaller, sports medicine/surgery was in the stone age and baseball players didn't know a goddamn thing about fitness.

you are seeing patterns in data that don't exist. this is a common failing of the human brain.

read the book, tango goes over all this stuff and shows that players do not in fact hit the ball more consistently over certain sample sizes or if they do it is only slightly more consistently. you're effectively data snooping for players that fit your hypothesis while ignoring all the many players who don't (those were probably just the guys that were running hot tho rite).

How does he go about showing this (generally)? I'd be inclined to read it just for this aspect, because it seems like something that is just near impossible to capture statistically.

http://books.google.com/books?id=FrU...page&q&f=false

if that doesn't link to the right page you want chapter 2, when you're hot you're hot.

cliff notes: being on a hitting streak is worth between 4 to 5 points of woba, unless you adjust for weather, park and pitcher faced in which case the woba advantage disappears entirely.

He shows that streaks have little to no predictive ability. He looks at what players who had a 5-game streak did in game 6. He looks how at what players who had a 7-game streak did in game 8, etc.

Yeah I'm really not disagreeing with any of that. I'm talking about cause rather than future effect, so I'll just leave it alone.

fwiw i don't think we were actually arguing about different things. you were building narratives (seeing the ball well, timing is right, etc) to explain stuff that is already explained by simple variance.

i don't think what you described as tango's method really disproves mjw's point. having a better eye plus being in a state of better mechanics should correlate to making better contact, and more hits. like, there's a difference between what mjw said and hitting streaks.