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Media & Entertainment Law

: Sports Law Blog

Another Statistic to Measure a Batter's Future Performance

By Rick Karcher, Michael McCann, Geoffrey Rapp, Greg Skidmore, and Howard Wasserman

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If you are one of those people convinced that future performance at the plate can be predicted by using some creative formula and crunching a bunch of numbers, Ron Shandler of USA Today mentions a statistic that I had never heard of before, the "Expected Batting Average" (Batters Don't Always Live Up (or Down) to Expectations):

It does start with a batter's ability to distinguish between balls and strikes, which we can measure using his walk/strikeout rate. Once he's determined a hittable pitch, we can measure his contact rate: (at-bats ? strikeouts) / at-bats. But once contact is made, we enter a gray area.
The odds of a batted ball falling for a hit are only partially within the batter's control. The stronger his power and speed skills ? along with his propensity to hit the ball on the ground, in the air or on a line ? the more control he may have over the outcome. But even the hardest-hit ball can become an out.
"Expected batting average," or xBA, calculates what a player's batting average should be based upon these component events along with a normalization for aberrant batting average on balls-in-play (BABIP) levels.

I have always been skeptical of using complex mathematical formulas to predict a batter's future performance. And it's not because I don't understand them or consciously don't want to try to understand them, which is what the statisticians like to say about the "traditional-minded" scouts. Here is my explanation. In one game the ball can look like a beach ball floating at 45 mph, and in another game the ball thrown by that same pitcher looks like a golf ball darting at 125 mph. I don't know why that is, and there is no formula or computer that can be used to explain it. It's called "being in the zone," and it's just one of those things in which the baseball gods have been toying with batters ever since the game was invented. But it definitely drives statisticians and lawyers crazy....

Full post as published by Sports Law Blog on September 10, 2008 (boomark / email).