I woke up this morning with my scalp tingling and my fingers itching, and quickly came to realize that the problem was that I hadn’t posted a big table full of numbers for at least 24 hours. This cannot stand, of course. The OOTP Gods will not accept that kind of slackardly behavior.
Also, since it turns out that I’ve been expressly focused on BABIP for the past couple days—among other things … have I told you yet that I have my development scripts re-coded for v25? Yeah…watch this space maybe?). The issue regarding my fixation on BABIP stems from a weird data cut I did in which ATC and LV stood out. I’m not sure what to make of it, but here’s the chart I took (and have subsequently posted to the OOTP devs…bottom line, I’m not sure that’s really too far out of whack, but I’m still thinking there’s a weird little BIP apportionment issue happening…I’m just not yet smart enough to either figure it out, or convince myself all is well):
After some chatter, I got to wondering how out various team’s pitching and defense and ballparks were combining to influence Batted Balls In Play (as one does). So I cut that data out of my script’s results, and put it into the following big chart of numbers.
Note: symptoms of my anxiety immediately quelled, thank you very much for asking
Interesting, isn’t it?
Note that Atlantic City and Vegas are above average across the board, as is San Fernando—though the magnitude of the Bear’s higher performance is not high anywhere except line drives—where they, Portland, Twin Cities, and Charm City are VERY HIGH. How long can that last? I have no idea.
On the other side of the coin, Brooklyn (long known for what seems to be a nearly religious disdain for anything to do with leather) and Calgary are the only two teams who register below average BABIP on every type of batted balls their pitchers are allowing.
The rest fall, obviously, in between.
FUN OBSERVANCE OF THE DAY: WHAT IS UP WITH AUSTIN’S POP-UP DEFENSE?
I admit I’m not exactly sure what to do with this. For my own part, I’m happy to see Bikini’s infield defense begin to go green. We’ve been working at it for a bit, and by gut reaction I felt like we should be average or above at every position. So that fits. Likewise, I’m not surprised to see out flyball defense is something close to putrid. Between this metric, and the PAA metric (which should relate well, but which I haven’t compared here), that gives me a feel that my expectations were not very far off.
A quick calculation I’ve done to get a workable number is that, with 363 Fly Balls to date, that .033 BABIP delta represents about 12 hits that our defense has given up relative to league average. Are my hitters making up for that? I dunno. Sounds like a job for our stats crew, right?
Anyway, you can do your own mathing.
Feel free to teach me anything you learn.
Or not.
I’ll probably just be busy staring at screens of tables either way.
