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| About to turn the corner?
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David Ortiz has a six-game hitting streak. It's modest as these things go -- he's 7 for 25 with a double and a homer that someone described to me as a cheapie -- but .280 over six games is nothing to sneeze at when you're having the kind of year Ortiz is.
Now comes someone -- specifically Will Moller at The Yankee Dollar blog -- suggesting that maybe Ortiz is about to turn the corner due to the fact that his BABIP is way, way lower than one would expect given how many line drives he's hitting:
If Ortiz was .030 above or below his expected BABIP, I'd be inclined to view it as mostly statistical noise. .100 is absurd. He's still making contact, and he's putting balls in play, hard . . . A deeper analysis would probably uncover that Ortiz has a bigtime hole in his swing that didn't exist before, that is being exploited by opposing pitchers. But it's bizarre to see a player suddenly hitting a ton more line drives, walking less, and striking out more . . . Long story short: Big Papi is going to stop being the butt of so many jokes before the year is out.
I'm savvy enough to understand that flukey-strange BABIP numbers like that are often signs that bad luck is afoot, but going much further than that is above my pay grade. And the increased strikeouts/fewer walks Moller notices could be evidence that Papi is just being challenged way more than most players now, and that his guesses are simply getting slightly better.
It continues to strike me, however, that Ortiz can't keep this April-May performance up forever and that some sort of improvement has to happen. Perhaps what Moller noticed here is evidence that that improvement is already occurring, even if we haven't really seen it reflected in the box score as of yet.
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Moller definately hits on something here. Ortiz hits into an extreme shift most of the time and has been hitting a LOT of line drives right into gloves this season. His HR/FB rate is obviously very low with only two HR's so far and that is the biggest cause for concern. He has left a lot of FB just short of the walls, when previous to his wrist injury he was hitting alot of no doubt home runs. Papi is still hitting the ball hard and still getting a decent amount of doubles, so if he gets a few more breaks he could easily be 280/360/470 on the year, but with limited HR power Papi's days may be numbered.
Still, Papi has always been great at contolling the strikezone and seeing alot of pitches and he is still doing that, though losing the battles more than usual. If he can turn on a few and send them to the upper decks again, then I would start to pay very close attention.
Shortly after you posted this, Tom Tango posted data from John Dewan showing that David Ortiz has lost about 18 feet on average (across the different batted ball types) on his batted balls this year. Last year, he was down about 18 feet from the year before. I want Papi to recover as much as the next guy (well, the next non-Yankee fan), but this don't look so good.
I would say it's a combination of things.
1) Defensive/Pitching Adjustments. In '04 noone used as shift against him, now it's a standard. Pitchers almost exclusively pitch him inside as well. Obviously this makes it much harder for him to go the other way and use the green monster. Ortiz hasn't been able to effectively adjust to this.
2) Potentially, past steroid use and now a lack thereof. At his age it's way too early to blame him getting old for this kind of epic slump. In his heydey, the guy could hit any pitch, any speed, anywhere on the plate out of the park. Nowadays he couldn't hit the water in the middle of the ocean. I think for him, steroids provided a bat speed to compliment his monumental power. I think he likely stopped using with all of the recent scrutiny and his body responded.
3) I'm not sold on the old age argument unless he lied about his age originally. At his age he should have at least 5 good years left, ESPECIALLY as a DH. Unless the guy is really 40, I don't think this applies as much as Red Sox fans wish.
There's something called an old player skill set that tends to age very poorly, and Ortiz is perhaps the quintessential example of a hitter with such a skill set. Players with limited speed and contact ability, who get by with power and patience, often fall of a cliff in their early 30s. The theory is that these players are already limited by bat speed that's toward the lower end of the acceptable range for major league hitters. They make up for this limitation by being selective (taking pitches they can't get to) and murdering pitches they can reach. When the natural effects of aging slow down the bat of a player like this, though, he has nothing to fall back on. Check out Richie Sexson's career arc for a prime (and sad) example of this phenomenon.
Papi's hitting again? Time to run some PED tests...
Guys in Boston NEVER USED PED'S, U MUST BE MISTAKEN .............
Mitchel Report
BABIP, what the PHUCK is this ???,,,,,,,,, everyday there is a NEW STAT,,,,,, soon there will be a stat for FARTS between innings, at bats .......
PaPi is experiencing what many FORMER STEROIDS USERS USUALLY DO ,,,,,,,,,,,,, THE DOWN CYCLE.....
You make an intelligent point. Measuring a player's batting average on balls in play, correlating that with his batted ball profile, and figuring out how much of it is due to luck is as useful as measuring that player's flatulence. You should be an analyst!
For someone with such an obvious distaste for science, you seem awfully confident that you know how steroids work and how to spot users. Perhaps you could enlighten the rest of us.
Just FYI, BABIP's not very new.
Sure he's due for some improvement. That's like saying a pitcher with a 12.00 ERA whose peripherals support a 6.75 ERA is due for an improvement. The end result is still pretty ugly.