Stat Spotlight- BABIP: So Austin Jackson Isn't Ty Cobb?

No. He is not. Austin Jackson is most certainly not Ty Cobb. Not to say he isn't or won't be a nice player, but Jackson is probably not the player that blew the league away in April, winning the A.L. rookie of the month honors. In fact a few days into May, Jackson was batting .377, an average that was surely a product of a hot start and a small sample size.

But how does one explain a "hot start" reasonably? How can you tell when a player is a truly great, transcendent hitter, bound to compete for a batting title, or just a guy who's getting lucky? Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you BABIP. Batting Average on Balls in Play (BABIP) is a statistic used to weed out the Ichiro's from the Ajax's. What BABIP does is it eliminates strike-outs, walks and sacrifice flies from a hitters batting average, leaving only the balls he actually puts in play to be averaged out. By doing this, teams are better able to gauge whether or not a hitter has had an exceptional amount of luck (balls dropping in for hits, winds carrying out to right field, playing the Nationals regularly), or an exceptional amount of bad luck (diving stops by the short stops, strong throws from the hole to nab the runner, playing a team of 9 Carl Crawford clones) over the course of a season.

Let's go back to Jackson. His .377 batting average in early May was high not just because he was hot with the bat, but also because he was getting exceptionally lucky, to the tune of a .532 BABIP (league average is around .300). By comparison, Ichiro's career BABIP is .358, obscenely high in it's own right, but certainly not close to .532. So where is Jackson today? Well as you might expect, due to his obvious early season luck and his propensity to swing and miss 28 percent of the time, that batting average has dropped to a more reasonable, but still acceptable .300. And his BABIP, well that dropped too, by .117 points to .415. Obviously, AJAX's luck has started to run out. The problem for Tigers fans is that unless Jackson is a better hitter than Ichiro, that current BABIP is still WAY too high to be sustained. His luck may have started to run out, but it's still got a long way to go before it's gone. Because of that, his pretty .300 BA probably won't be around much longer either.

Ed. Note: BABIP also works in assessing how lucky a pitcher has been, in the exact same way it works for hitters. If a pitcher is allowing BABIP's well above or well below that .300 mark, he's probably dealt with his fair share of luck, good or bad. However, if your pitcher maintains an extremely high BABIP against, then he's probably this guy.