The Cleveland Indians have finally hit a cold stretch. They’ve dropped five of their last nine games, and missed two chances to beat up on the Seattle Mariners this weekend when torrential rain hit Progressive Field.
And yet, the Indians still have the best record (24-13) and run differential (+41) in baseball. The second-place Detroit Tigers have won 10 of their last 11 games and they’re still 3.5 games behind Cleveland in the AL Central standings. Anyway, finishing a game under .500 against the Athletics, Angels, and Rays isn’t much of a cold streak.
As the Tribe looks to start another winning streak tonight against the Kansas City Royals, it’s worth revisiting the issue of luck in Cleveland’s lineup. 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-and-a-half for BABIP to become reliable.
Thanks to The Hardball Times’ fantastically amazing xBABIP calculator, we can get an estimate of what players’ hit rates would be in a luck-neutral environment based on factors like speed, power, strikeout rate, and batted-ball profile. By plugging his expected hit rate in for his actual BABIP, we can get an idea of how a player would do in a completely neutral context.
Using their xBABIPs and Power Factors, I calculated context-neutral slashlines for each of the nine Indians players with more than 75 plate appearances this year. Here are the results, sorted by the difference between their expected and actual OPSes:
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As we saw before, there’s some very good news at the top of this chart regarding the Tribe’s two most high-profile slumpers. Choo’s BABIP is 87 points lower than it “should” be based on his batted-ball profile. His .801 xOPS isn’t quite what we’ve come to expect from the man we call “CHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” but it’s clear from this that his biggest problem this year has been bad luck.
Ditto for Carlos Santana. His .220 average isn’t pretty, but a .741 Power Factor is pretty darn good for a catcher. Most importantly, his trademark phenomenal plate discipline is still intact—his 16.2% walk rate ranks sixth in the league (believe it or not, that’s actually down from last year). He’ll be fine.
It’s comforting to see that Orlando Cabrera has been unlucky, though even his .701 xOPS isn’t much to write home about and I’m skeptical about his .323 xBABIP. I’m amazed, though, that Asdrubal Cabrera and Jack Hannahan, who are both on their way to career years as is, are actually underperforming.
Michael Brantley’s been a tad unfortunate as well, though other than lifting his xBA over .300 there isn’t much of a difference between his actual and expected stats. LaPorta’s numbers are identical both ways. Neither player looks like a superstar, and three years after the CC Sabathia trade LaPorta still seems like a disappointment, but at least their current successes appear sustainable.
A recent slump has brought Grady Sizemore down to earth, but even if his 1.273 Power Factor is sustainable (these calculations treat it as an exogenous variable) he’s due to slip a little more.
The only regular who really seems to be playing over his head is Travis Hafner. It’s been great seeing Pronk look like an intimidating hitter again (his walk-off shot to dead-center Friday night was magical), but it looks like his success has largely been a fluke. Yes, he’s been hitting the ball hard, but xBABIP accounts for that. Not convinced? Consider this: in 2006, the best year of his career, his hit rate was .323—just one point off his xBABIP now.
These numbers aren’t foolproof predictions—they simply represent the most likely outcomes for each hitter over the rest of the season. Luck could keep the outliers off their predicted paces all year, but assuming their batted-ball profiles stay consistent (they might not) the best bets for their production going forward are their xOPSes.
Still, on the whole, it seems like Tribe hitters are actually getting slightly unlucky. Bouncebacks from Choo and Santana will more than make up for Sizemore and Hafner’s regressions, with Brantley and the entire infield on pace for boosts as well.
The Indians may be due to regress in some other aspects of the game—say, pitching—but Cleveland’s lineup will be fine.
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