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I just ran across this article over at The Baseball Analysts titled “BABIP: Slicing and Dicing Groundball Out Rates“. It’s well written and anyone who uses Batting Average on Balls In Play as a statistical tool to find trends in hitter and/or pitchers should really take a look at this piece. A few comments of mine from a fantasy point of view:

“Most pitchers regress toward the league average BABIP of around .300 or .305. Very few pitchers can repeatedly do better or worse than this, so we say that pitchers have very little control over BABIP. Hitters, on the other hand, can have a substantial amount of control over BABIP. Ichiro Suzuki, for example, has a .356 career BABIP. Hitters do not regress toward league average, rather, they each regress toward their own, unique number.”

It can make a huge difference if you make the mistake of calculating BABIP for hitters using league average instead of their own unique number. This is an amazing piece of advice from Derek Carty who is mentioned in this piece at The Baseball Analysts becasue of an article he wrote on BABIP estimators.

According to THT, the MLB average groundball out rate was 74 percent in 2007 and 2008. By comparison, the MLB average flyball out rate was 83 percent in 2007 and 84 percent in 2008. Another way of looking at those percentages is to say that batters hit about .260 on groundballs and .160-.170 on outfield flyballs (excluding home runs).

The line drive out rate was 29 percent in 2008, meaning batters hit roughly .710 on these batted balls. The hit rate on infield flies is nearly non-existent as pop-ups are converted into outs 99 percent of the time.

When it comes to batting average, line drives are king, followed by groundballs, outfield flyballs, and infield flies. Put it all together and National and American League teams hit .298 and .302, respectively, on balls in play in 2008. NL and AL clubs had BABIP of .301 and .305 in 2007.

When you’re looking for help with the batting average category, look at line drive percentages. Seven of the top ten hitters in line drive percentage batted above .290 in 2008. The other three batted .287, .271, and .271.

When I am searching for waiver wire help or evaluating talent amongst [tag]starting pitchers[/tag], I like to look at some of the things that pitchers have complete control over. When the pitcher throws the ball, for the most part, if it misses the batters bat, the pitcher has almost total control of the outcome of that play. A strike or a ball are the outcomes I am speaking of there. If the ball is hit into play, the pitcher doesn’t have too much control over the outcome of the play anymore; unless the ball goes over the fence for a home run.

So, instead of looking at ERA and WHIP to evaluate starting pitchers, I like to use the ratios K/9 and BB/9. If a pitcher has a high K/9 and a low BB/9 and isn’t giving up very many home runs, there is a good chance he is performing pretty well.

I’m going to list the top 10 starting pitchers in [tag]K/9[/tag] and [tag]BB/9[/tag] here. These numbers will mean more as the season gets a little older, and it’s pretty useless to add HR/9 right now; but this may prove point here.

Now, Ted Lilly is on both lists (which is good for him). That means there are 19 players here to look at. 11 of those 19 have ERA’s under 3.00. Eight of the 19 have ERA’s below 2.50.