BABIP: A Deceiving Statistic

In an effort to dig deeper into this mess, I decided to pull up some split stats on the situation. Using home/road splits, I noticed that not only did Marcum, Burnett, and McGowan have low BABIPs, but at the Rogers Centre, their low BABIP's remained just as low, if not lower. Roy Halladay, who wasn't in the top 40 lowest BABIP's, now appears in the top 15 when we only look at home BABIP's.

This adds to the assumption that the Rogers Centre has something to do with the low BABIP. Maybe it doesn't...but maybe it does.

Upon further examination of Zito, Santana and Zambrano, I noticed that, like Young, they all have a knack for low BABIP's annually.

With the number of pitchers who annually have low BABIP's and the amount of Blue Jays and Cubs on the list, I don't think BABIP gives us enough insight to help in fantasy baseball. It is extremely unpredictable, extremely variable and seems to have some patterns that are unable to be explained.

During the season, it may be useful around the All-Star break to identify which pitchers have high or low BABIP's that may regress towards the mean during the second half of the season.

Until then, we should be focusing most on DIPS, ERC and K/9.

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