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Editors Note: This article was originally slated to run on Friday, so stats are as of last Thursday.  It doesn't change any conclusions for practical purposes.

Anyone that has been playing fantasy baseball for a while is quite familiar with the concept of batting average on balls in play. Any time we see a player jump out of the gate with an extremely high or low batting average, we scan the BABIP column on his player page to see how the player is doing in that regard. Traditionally, league average BABIP sites around .290-.310, but as I pointed out last week, the league is trending downward in that regard in recent years.

The aforementioned 20 point range is rather small when you consider the volatility of the BABIP metric. After all, the highest score this season currently belongs to Travis Hafner at .415 while Drew Butera owns the lowest at .174 for all players with at least 100 plate appearances heading into play on Thursday. Still, BABIP does show some patterns as it relates to players’ ages.

The above graph shows the range between the highest and lowest BABIP at each age for all players with at least 400 plate appearances in a single season between 2000 and 2010.  We notice that for older players, the range between the highest and the lowest BABIPs is smaller than for younger players.  There are a couple of possible reasons for this.  The first is that there are fewer older players than younger players and therefore fewer opportunities for there to be extreme, luck-based BABIPs.  Combine this with survivor bias–that is, older players only keep playing if they are reasonably good–and the players with very low true BABIPs go away.  Conversely, as players lose bat speed and foot speed as they get older, the highest true BABIPs for older players will be lower than they are for younger players.

The range begins to show decline after age 34 while the largest volatility shows up at age 28 thanks to Manny Ramirez posting a .403 total in 2000. If we remove Ramirez’s total as an outlier, the next highest BABIP is 39 points lower and it belongs to Freddy Sanchez from his career year of 2006. In all, the metric appears to have a slight bump in the traditional prime ages of 27 to 32 and then levels off for the older players as bat and foot speed slowly start to fade away.  There certainly can be outliers in that regard, though.  After all, Julio Franco maintained a .355 BABIP in his major league career after returning from Japan and Chipper Jones had a .383 BABIP as recently as three seasons ago on his way to a .362 TAv.

The table below breaks down the data from the earlier line graph by age and also shows the 2011 BABIP leader by age.

Age

Instances

Highest

Lowest

range

Player

2011 BABIP

22

68

0.393

0.250

0.143

Hosmer

0.340

23

86

0.396

0.226

0.170

Morrison

0.319

24

141

0.395

0.248

0.147

Wallace

0.389

25

187

0.379

0.227

0.152

Lucroy

0.355

26

217

0.394

0.240

0.154

Craig

0.395

27

218

0.377

0.226

0.151

Votto

0.392

28

220

0.403

0.196

0.207

Pence

0.373

29

206

0.391

0.233

0.158

Ethier

0.383

30

196

0.399

0.225

0.174

Bautista

0.338

31

189

0.387

0.228

0.159

Holliday

0.395

32

151

0.404

0.217

0.187

Dobbs

0.400

33

133

0.389

0.229

0.160

Byrd

0.376

34

113

0.374

0.224

0.150

Hafner

0.415

35

92

0.386

0.228

0.158

Berkman

0.326

36

70

0.383

0.245

0.138

Guerrero

0.310

37

42

0.337

0.228

0.109

Abreu

0.358

38

27

0.373

0.240

0.133

N/A

0.000

39

14

0.355

0.220

0.135

Mora

0.286

40

17

0.317

0.239

0.078

N/A

0.000

 

 

I list the current leaders to put their performance in perspective, but keep in mind that just 40 percent of the way through the season, BABIPs will be more extreme than their end-of-year counterparts. For example, Allen Craig’s .395 BABIP is higher than anything a 26-year old has done in at least 400 plate appearances in the previous ten seasons, and we see the same thing with 31-year old Matt Holliday. The player that really jumps off the page, however, is Travis Hafner, whose .415 BABIP is 39 points higher than the previous high for his age group. Given that Hafner has only hit five home runs in 127 plate appearances this season, he is very likely to cool off at the plate once he returns from injury since he is putting more balls in play than he did in his prime power days.

Fellow elder-statesman Bobby Abreu is in a similar territory as his BABIP is 21 points higher than anyone in his age group over the past ten seasons. Abreu’s power is also down as he has but two home runs this season after hitting 20 in two of the past three seasons, so a likely reduction in his BABIP is going to further drag down his numbers that are already being held back by a struggling Angels offense. In the National League, Greg Dobbs stands out with his .400 BABIP as the majority-side of the third base platoon in Florida, but he had a similar successful season in 2008 in Philadelphia in 240 plate appearances.  While Jose Bautista is leading 30-year olds in BABIP this season, his BABIP was only .233 last year as the balls that actually stayed in the park often found a defender’s glove.   

For the reasons discussed at the beginning of the article, BABIP surprises are more likely to happen for younger players, which is why a .389 BABIP for Brett Wallace or a .384 BABIP for Matt Joyce is not as surprising as Greg Dobbs and Travis Hafner both posting BABIPs of at least .400 at this point in the season. 13 players have BABIPs of at least .370 heading into Thursday night, and a total of 30 enjoy at least a .350 BABIP. If we look back to just last season at all players that accumulated at least 400 plate appearances, we find just ten players with a BABIP of at least .350 and only four higher than .370. Needless to say, the current group of fortunate hitters will have its numbers trimmed down in the coming weeks and it will not be just Hafner, Abreu, and Dobbs leaving the group.

With a younger player, it is less risky to see if he can be the next outlier for his age group. However, with older players who are far-exceeded their peers such as Hafner, Abreu, Dobbs, Jamey Carroll, and Kosuke Fukudome, it would be wise to start formulating a back-up plan so you can pair up a fading player with one about to surge.

Thank you for reading

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timber
6/13
Hosmer is 21, not 22, FWIW.
moonlightj
6/13
The row header wasn't accurate there...that should show 22 and younger. Just as 40 shows anyone 40 or higher
wendtm
6/13
Wouldn't we expect BABIP rates to go down, as HR rates go down? As baseball evolved to where everyone hit homeruns, pitchers evolved towards going for more strikeouts, and BABIPs went up a bit. Now with the reverse happening, we are seeing lower K rates and lower BABIPs. I guess it wouldn't be too hard to come up with what might be some just-so stories as to why, but it seems pitching is evolving back toward what it was in my youth, with a lot of pitchers throwing four or five pitches, mixing things up, changing speeds and location as opposed to blowing it by people. I expect we'll see more guys who don't, or barely, break 90 in the future.

Has the overall HR/FB rate moved much in the last few years? My guess (and I'm too lazy to do the work myself) is that two things contributed - 1- most of the newest ballparks lean toward the pitchers, after an era when most new parks favored hitters, and 2 (more important)- there are more banjo-hitting types now, after an era when there were very few. This has led to an environment that has a lower HR/FB rate MLB-wide (prediction), and thus provided a greater niche for low-K pitchers. I don't know if a lower BABIP is driven by a lower BABIP on fly balls, or - more likely - are a more "organic" - hate that term - outgrowth of the newer, more old-style pitching patterns on display.
moonlightj
6/13
I'm actually working on this for my Wednesday article