Batting average on balls in play
Encyclopedia
In baseball statistics
, Batting average on balls in play (abbreviated BABIP) is a statistic measuring the percentage of plate appearance
s ending with a batted ball in play (excluding home runs) for which the batter is credited with a hit . BABIP is commonly used as a red flag
in sabermetric analysis, as a consistently high or low BABIP is hard to maintain - much more so for pitchers than hitters. Therefore, BABIP can be used to spot fluky seasons by pitchers, as with other statistical measures, those pitchers whose BABIPs are extremely high can often be expected to improve in the following season, and those pitchers whose BABIPs are extremely low can often be expected to regress in the following season.
A normal BABIP is around .300, though the baseline regression varies depending on number of factors including the quality of the team's defense (e.g. a team with an exceptionally bad defense might yield a BABIP as high as .315) and the pitching tendencies of the pitcher (for instance, whether he is a groundball or flyball pitcher). While a pitcher's BABIP may go up and down in an individual season, there are distinct differences between pitchers' career averages . Very few pitchers with long careers have BABIP above the league average and there are no pitchers in the Hall of Fame with a BABIP higher than .300.
The equation for BABIP is:
where H is hits
, HR is home runs, AB is at bats, K is strikeouts, and SF is sacrifice flies.
Baseball statistics
Statistics play an important role in summarizing baseball performance and evaluating players in the sport.Since the flow of a baseball game has natural breaks to it, and normally players act individually rather than performing in clusters, the sport lends itself to easy record-keeping and statistics...
, Batting average on balls in play (abbreviated BABIP) is a statistic measuring the percentage of plate appearance
Plate appearance
In baseball statistics, a player is credited with a plate appearance each time he completes a turn batting. A player completes a turn batting when: He strikes out or is declared out before reaching first base; or He reaches first base safely or is awarded first base ; or He hits a fair ball which...
s ending with a batted ball in play (excluding home runs) for which the batter is credited with a hit . BABIP is commonly used as a red flag
Red flag (signal)
Red flag is a semi-official term to denote various attention and awareness indicators and signals, both explicit and implicit. It can be used in various contexts usually as a warning or when things seem too good to be true as well as unexpectedly good results.The earliest citation for "red flag" in...
in sabermetric analysis, as a consistently high or low BABIP is hard to maintain - much more so for pitchers than hitters. Therefore, BABIP can be used to spot fluky seasons by pitchers, as with other statistical measures, those pitchers whose BABIPs are extremely high can often be expected to improve in the following season, and those pitchers whose BABIPs are extremely low can often be expected to regress in the following season.
A normal BABIP is around .300, though the baseline regression varies depending on number of factors including the quality of the team's defense (e.g. a team with an exceptionally bad defense might yield a BABIP as high as .315) and the pitching tendencies of the pitcher (for instance, whether he is a groundball or flyball pitcher). While a pitcher's BABIP may go up and down in an individual season, there are distinct differences between pitchers' career averages . Very few pitchers with long careers have BABIP above the league average and there are no pitchers in the Hall of Fame with a BABIP higher than .300.
The equation for BABIP is:
where H is hits
Hit (baseball)
In baseball statistics, a hit , also called a base hit, is credited to a batter when the batter safely reaches first base after hitting the ball into fair territory, without the benefit of an error or a fielder's choice....
, HR is home runs, AB is at bats, K is strikeouts, and SF is sacrifice flies.