Counting on a big season from Denard Span

While I hate to simply use the “L” word to defend a player’s bad season, I do believe Span suffered from some pretty bad luck in 2010.

While I think that’s a fine argument, it also raises a fear – what if 2009 was a lucky year, not the other way around? While his stats were generally pretty similar from 2008 to 2009, check this out:

2008 LD%: 25.7
2009 LD%: 18.8
2008 BABIP: .339
2009 BABIP: .354

The shorthand for expected BABIP is LD% + .120, which would come out to about .310 in 2009. As a fast guy who hits lots of ground balls (which have higher BABIP than fly balls), he’d probably expect to come in higher, but I don’t know about 40 points higher, like it was in ’09.

Warm, fuzzy optimism. :)

In 700 plate appearances, Denard swung at the first pitch 153 times…or on about 21.9% of his plate appearances.

Of course, Denard had 705 plate appearances last year, but I think saying that he swung at about 22% of his first pitches is pretty accurate.

Thats definitely poor luck.

The original post used batted ball profile numbers from fangraphs and batted ball BABIPs from Baseball-Reference. The sites get their data from different sources and mixing the two results in some misleading information, since a “line drive” on fangraphs is sometimes a “flyball” on baseball-reference. There’s information to be gleaned from the differences, so it’s not all bad. Let’s take a look:

First, here’s all the numbers.

Fangraphs has Span’s component BABIPs and batted ball profiles as follows:

2008: .265 GB /.216 FB / .597 LD (53.9% GB, 20.4% FB, 25.7% LD)
2009: .302 GB / .173 FB / .711 LD (53.1% GB, 28.1% FB, 18.8% LD)
2010: .220 GB / .143 FB / .755 LD (54.3% GB, 27.6% FB, 18.0% LD)

These are the batted ball profiles used in the article above, but not the BABIPs.

Baseball Reference has:

2008: .257 GB / .273 FB / .655 LD (54.5% GB, 25.8% FB, 19.7% LD)
2009: .287 GB / .203 FB / .763 LD (52.9% GB, 30.4% FB, 16.7% LD)
2010: .223 GB / .186 FB / .677 LD (54.5% GB, 27.3% FB, 18.2% LD)

These are the BABIPs, but per different profiles. Since each source uses the same underlying facts (i.e. the actual balls Span put in play) to assemble its numbers, it makes sense to look at the totality of each set on its own/in comparison to the other whole set, but it’s misleading to look at the profile on one in conjunction with the BABIP of the other.

The major discrepancy is between the FB and LD numbers, which is understandable and a result of one system characterizing an actual “fliner” as a line drive and the other as a fly ball. Clearly Denard hits a lot of hard-to-classify tweener fliners.

Looking at his fangraph numbers in isolation it looks like he hit a TON of line drives in 2008 but a below average number fell for hits, whereas he got very lucky on his flyballs. Still he hit so many LDs his BABIP was great. His 2008 B-R numbers make him look like he hit a normal distribution of batted balls but got insanely lucky on flyballs. Since they’re both talking about the same underlying set of batted balls, it’s pretty clear what’s going on: he hit a lot of in between fliners, balls less valuable overall than standard LDs and more valuable by far than flyballs. The high number of fliners was very probably lucky — nobody sustains a 25.7% LD rate (Fangraphs way of representing this phenomenon) nor a .273 FB BABIP (B-R’s way of representing this).

In 2009, there was an anomaly with GBs. Fangraphs didn’t charge him with 3 ABs on PAs resulting in GB outs, thus giving him a higher GB BABIP (.302). But B-R still saw him as lucky/good on his groundballs (.287 GB BABIP). With more than half his batted balls hit on the ground, there’s his very good season right there. Unlike 26% linedrives or .270 FBBABIP, that’s not an impossible number to sustain for a good hitter with good speed, and anyone who can hit .287 on GBs is going to have a solid career as a hitter.

What about the LD/FB discrepancy in 2009? Well, B-R called a bunch of balls that were called LDs by Fangraphs (i.e. actual “fliners”) FBs, resulting in a higher BABIP for both FBs and LDs on B-R, because B-R’s LD BABIP was “purifed” of lower-valued fliners, which in turn helped the much crappier FB BABIP go up. Regardless, the numbers are pretty normal – either a little lucky for FBs but with a normal LD% (fangraphs) OR substantially lucky for FBs with a weak LD%. I find it hard to believe that a hitter like Span will post a FB BABIP much above average (usually around .140-.150) over the long haul, but plausible that he’d post normal LD BABIP and high GB BABIP, so on the whole I’d say he probably was a little lucky in 2009.

While Fangraphs and B-R yield virtually identical distributions of batted balls for 2010, it’s obvious that a whole bunch of fliners ended up in different places in the two data sets, basically trading places with each other. There’s not much of consequence to take away except that, once again, Denard Span seems to hit a lot of in these balls.

Whichever data you prefer, Denard had a below-average BABIP on GBs last year, which is downright weird for a faster-than-average player. However, this jibes with the stuff people are saying about chasing down and in pitches and chopping the ball slowly to the right side.

Denard’s fliner proclivity marries well with Luke’s great point about defense. The flipside of BABIP is DER, and the hit Denard’s B-R LD BABIP took may very well result in significant part from improved defensive positioning to catch shallow fliners (which hang up longer than pure LDs, making them more catchable).

Looking at all his other numbers, Span’s O-contact jumped right out at me, too. He wouldn’t really be better off missing, obviously: he’d be better off taking, but poked-at, reached-for, shallow outfield fliners or jam-shot choppers aren’t the best sorts of “line drives” or “ground balls”, plainly. Whether such fliners go in the Inside Edge data book as “well hit” or not, I have no idea. I remember reading a piece that criticized Inside Edge’s well-hit numbers but have no idea what it might have been, so I can’t really speak to that.

Span’s season last year can be summarized as one in which he made a TON of contact but didn’t come away with much to show for it. BABIP for hitters IS a skill, albeit one with a high degree of year-to-year variance. It’s tempting to believe Span “just” got unlucky last year, but having watched all the PAs you folks watched I tend to think he just wasn’t that good last year. I totally concur that he’s young enough and has a solid enough approach to turn it around. That turnaround, however, will likely NOT result in a lifetime FB BABIP around .200, but rather a GB BABIP closer to 2008/2009 than 2010, as well as a bounce-back in the BB rate.

BTW, that BB rate is explainable: despite excellent discipline, his O-Swing STILL went up relative to 2008/2009. He saw FEWER strikes overall, so that’s a bunch more swings at junk on a whole, and not a good thing.