New Stats
BABIP-IFB
It’s mostly true that pitchers have little control over their balls in play, so if a pitcher is too far from the league average BABIP his performance is likely going to regress to the mean. However, one reliable way a pitcher has to control his BABIP is by inducing popups. Since popups have the same result as a strikeout 99% of the time (batter is out, runners can’t advance) BABIP-IFB treats popups the same as a strikeout, and removes them from the denominator of BABIP.
By removing popups low BABIP pitchers that looked “lucky” who induce a lot of popups no longer appear to be candidates for regression. For example Jose Quintana has a .266 BABIP this year but he’s second in the AL in infield flies allowed. Normal BABIP would say he’s likely to have more hits start falling in, but by taking away his popups, we see his BABIP is actually close to the league average. If he continues this infield fly rate all year, he’s likely to keep up his .266 BABIP.
BABIP-IFB is listed next to BABIP in the “Balls In Play” table.
TTO%
Three true outcomes percentage. The percentage of time a plate appearance results in a strike out, walk, or home run. Not incredibly useful for analysis, but it is interesting to see how little a guy like Adam Dunn puts the ball in play. Added to the “balls not in play” table.
Changes
Fractional innings pitched are shown in the more common “.0, .1 and .2″ form. Before they were shown as “.0, .3, and .7″.
Zone swing percentage has been fixed to read as “ZSwng%” it was mistakenly shown as “ZSwng” before.
