The Cleveland Indians are no longer surprising flukes off to a hot start. With the best record in baseball (19-8) and no close competitors in the AL Central, this team is starting to be taken seriously.
ESPN had the Tribe at third in its weekly Power Rankings yesterday. FanGraphs’ Dave Cameron wrote: “Minnesota and Chicago are now going to have to put it into another gear to take the division back from the Tribe’s hands.” And Baseball Prospectus gave the Indians a 39.3% chance of winning the division after this weekend after their sweep of the Detroit Tigers.
With analysts now starting to concede that Cleveland’s success is at least somewhat legitimate, it’s worth looking again at how the Indians’ lineup would fare in a context-neutral environment.
One of the best ways to quantify luck is Batting Average on Balls in Play, also known as “hit rate.” It’s exactly what it sounds like: the proportion of balls hit inside the confines of the diamond that result in the batter reaching base. Almost every hitter’s BABIP ends up around .300, and while some batters’ natural hit rates vary from this mean—power hitters who make good contact and speedy guys who can run out infield hits tend to do better than slow-footed flyball hitters—most fluctuations are due to random chance. It takes far more than a month for BABIP to become reliable.
Using The Hardball Times’ fantastically amazing xBABIP calculator, we can get an estimate of what players’ hit rates would be in a luck-neutral environment. By plugging his expected hit rate in for his actual BABIP, we can get an idea of how a player would do in a neutral context.
Last week, I ran the numbers for each of the eight Indians with at least 50 plate appearances and concluded that, despite the general consensus that Tribe hitters were playing over their heads, they were actually getting somewhat unlucky.
Using their xBABIPs and Power Factors, I calculated updated figures for each player plus the newcomer to the 50-PA plateau, Grady Sizemore, sorted by the difference between their expected and actual OPSes: (click for bigger view)
Starting from the bottom, there’s some bad news for Tribe fans: the team’s two best hitters to date have been getting very, very lucky. Never in my lifetime has a batter maintained a BABIP as high as Travis Hafner’s over a full season. And don’t say he’s just hitting the ball well. In 2006, the best season of his career, Pronk ‘s BABIP was .323—almost identical to his xBABIP now.
Grady is in for significant regression as well, especially considering that his 1.176 Power Factor (taken as an exogenous variable in this calculation) is almost certainly unsustainable. Plug in his .758 career PF instead, and Sizemore’s xOPS falls to just .830—still quite good, but it’s a long way from 1.129.
Moving up, we get to the “slightly lucky” category, consisting of Matt LaPorta and Michael Brantley. The two youngsters have shown much improvement this season, even if they’re due for regressions. LaPorta is flashing improved pop, Brantley is showing great contact skills, and both are demonstrating solid plate discipline.
Things get interesting as we cross into the unlucky group. Had I not actually looked at the numbers, I would have guessed Orlando Cabrera would come out on the other side. But the more intriguing name is above him: Jack Hannahan. He’s come out nowhere this season, showing power (.762 Power Factor) that he’d never before displayed in his career. And while it’s easy to dismiss this as overperforming, these numbers imply that he’s actually been better than his stats would suggest.
It’s not surprising to see Shin-Soo Choo here, though an xOPS under .800 is still disappointing. What is unexpected is that Asdrubal Cabrera has been getting unlucky. Droobs was the talk of the town after he hit four homers in his first 10 games. And he’s been underperforming?
The best news for Tribe fans is at the top: Carlos Santana has a crazy insane 227-point discrepancy between his expected and actual OPSes. That’s what happens when you combine fantastic plate discipline (16.7% walk rate), good pop (1.000 Power Factor), and a sub-Mendoza Line hit rate.
Obviously it’s still a small sample size, and while xBABIP removes the luck from what already happened, the exogenous variables—batted-ball types, plate discipline and power numbers, etc.—are not necessarily representative of the players’ true talents. As a group, though, it seems like Indians’ lineup is hitting at a roughly true-talent pace. That’s great news for Cleveland going forward.
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