Have Hughes & Sabathia Just Been Lucky So Far This Year?
Posted by Steve L. on May 8th, 2010 · Comments (7)
There are some numbers to suggest this may be true.
Then again, maybe it’s just the Yankees defense playing well behind them?
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Yesterday in the first 2 innings the Red Sox were tatooing the ball, but they were all hit at soembody. There is definitely truth to this, but I believe they have also both pitched their asses off.
As a die hard Yankees fan in the mid 60′s to mid 70′s (when there were few of us around) I always thought Tom Seaver was just lucky—he always pitched when the other team wasn’t hitting.
I don’t know much about BABIP but it seems like risks taking pitchers whose skill is to “pitch to contact” and making them look “lucky” when in fact they are very skillful at the kind of pitching they do. There has to be a difference in guys who get hitters to product lots of weak ground balls, and pitchers who get smacked for lots of hard line drives.
Are BABIP numbers consistent with that sort of difference – do the pitchers we think of as getting lots of contact outs in fact have lower BABIPs than other pitchers?
I suppose it’s also true that if you are the sort of pitcher who gets outs by drawing weak grounders, you’ll do better with a decent defense behind you.
Yanks do lead MLB in DER (see Baseball Prospectus Statistics).
Oooh, and while we’re making tables and talking about luck in regards to balls in play…
http://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=all&stats=bat&lg=al&qual=y&type=2&season=2010&month=0
Sorry; you have to click the BABIP column twice to catch the drift of the reply just above this one.
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