Something I love about baseball

[ChuckS]

Yandy Diaz led the AL in BA last year at .330 and is hitting .243 this year.

Seems absurd and probably out of the realm of possibility if you were a Rays fan watching him hit last year. There’s nothing lucky about .330, but these wide range outcomes are more common than you would think on a year to year basis. 

Edited June 2 by ChuckS

[DrungoHazewood]

18 hours ago, owknows said:

Isn't this pretty much the same performance, only they gave him more carries?

Sure. But isn't that like saying a player pitched 85 innings of relief with a 3.00 ERA one year, then the next year he pitched 220 innings as a starter with a 3.00 ERA. I wouldn't say that was a consistent, expected performance.

[DrungoHazewood]

10 hours ago, ChuckS said:

Yandy Diaz led the AL in BA last year at .330 and is hitting .243 this year.

Seems absurd and probably out of the realm of possibility if you were a Rays fan watching him hit last year. There’s nothing lucky about .330, but these wide range outcomes are more common than you would think on a year to year basis. 

Yandy Diaz' BABIP for his career is .320. Last year it was .367. While batters exercise a larger degree of control over their BABIPs than pitchers, there is still a lot of noise (i.e. luck) in the data. This year his BABIP is down about 90 points compared to last. I would bet that's about equal parts not hitting the ball as well, and not having the balls he does hit fall in.

[Sports Guy]

People really underestimate luck and randomness.

Drungo is right….baseball is no different than any other sport.

[DrungoHazewood]

11 hours ago, Spy Fox said:

Yeah, I agree with those saying baseball is not really unique in this regard. 

It might be stronger in baseball than in most sports though. Baseball has more randomness than most. And more stat-collecting players than most. And a longer season than most, with a lot of attrition that gives backups chances to stick if they perform. So there are tons of opportunities for this sort of thing to happen.  

Baseball is different from most other team sports in a number of key aspects:

• The number of trials. 162 games is a lot of games to have random variation smooth out. If you pick random 16-game stretches you'll have NFL-like outliers, such as teams going 15-1 or 1-15. Nobody goes 150-12.
• Pitchers are very limited in how much they can pitch. A 200-inning starter can only have so much impact.
• Hitters cannot get more than ~1/8th of a team's PAs. This and the prior point means that there's no way around having your 3rd- and 5th and even 14th-best players getting almost as much playing time as #1.

So you end up with the most dominant teams usually not even winning 2/3rds of their games, wherein other sports you can have teams win 80% or more. Which makes baseball look more random. Contributing to this is the expanded playoffs, where a .600 vs .575 matchup is more-or-less a coin flip. I doubt most other sports have a situation where the obviously best team in the league has a 25%-ish shot of the Championship (in other words, a 75% chance of going home disappointed) on day one of the playoffs. In most soccer leagues the regular season champ is The Champ, so there's a 0% chance of that. The best team always takes a big trophy home.

[DrungoHazewood]

12 minutes ago, Sports Guy said:

People really underestimate luck and randomness.

Drungo is right….baseball is no different than any other sport.

With the caveats of my last post. Baseball is kind of unique in that Jorge Mateo and Adam Frazier can get as many chances to impact a game as Mike Trout. It's a little like a version of basketball where everyone on the court had to take at least 15% of the team's shots and nobody could take more than 25%. Or a version of football where you have five starting QBs, and they each only start once every five games.

And all of them get 162 games to even out the luck.

But, yes, variations in performance and randomness impact every sport.

Edited June 2 by DrungoHazewood

[now]

 Continuing to gnash teeth over our lineup with three Mendoza liners (Hays, Mullins, McCann; and Santander not far behind), it's fascinating to find context in current MLB ranking of lowest BA among qualifiers, featuring numerous legit stars who could otherwise rank at the top end. "Baseball is a funny game," indeed. My question is, is this year (1/3 way in) more anomalous than most?

Edited June 2 by now

[foxfield]

My Mama. My mama always said that Baseball is like a box of chok-lates. You just never know what your gonna get. 
 

She also said there’s no crying in baseball. 

[Just Regular]

I think Yandy is around that age one of the early charts I'd seen of the bat speed aging curves taper.    He is an amazing hitter, and it is a significant blow if he's gone off some kind of cliff.

His Sprint Speed percentile this year in single digits too after a run of years in the 30's and 40's.

The Rays told me basically how they esteemed him that year they hit him leadoff in the playoffs after he'd be out injured all August and September.