THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Friday, July 30, 2010

BABIP by count, applied to pitchers’ frequencies

Derek took the league average BABIP by count, and applied it to how often a pitcher reached those counts when a ball was put in play.  Makes perfect sense.  The overall results are here.  With extreme data points for one season at +/- 6 points, it’s almost not worth worrying about.

Sean at B-R.com also has that count data for every year here.

For those interested, I sort the ball-strike count data like this:
wOBA Ball Strike
0.569 3 0

0.496 3 1
0.450 2 0

0.407 3 2
0.381 2 1
0.381 1 0

0.342 0 0

0.323 1 1
0.296 2 2

0.291 0 1
0.248 1 2

0.220 0 2

Basically, you put it in order of balls minus strikes.

By the way, you get an r=.97 between ball and strike count against wOBA.  No surprise.  The general equation is this:
wOBA = leagueAverage + .07 * (balls - strikes)

That gets you most of the way there.