FTW
Quick Hitters, BABIP Losers: Mark Teixeira.
May 13, 2009 by kris · Leave a Comment
The Jays and Yankees in a tight one right now, Roy Halladay looks great and my girlfriend’s cookin’ up some potato-salmon friend fish cakes she found in a Jamie Oliver cookbook. Forty-Three Thousand apparently made it out to the Rogers Centre tonite.
The mental part of the game always blows my mind, and Mark Teixeira got me thinkin’ about BABIP and more specifically how hitters remain sane when the balls just aren’t dropping.
Teixeira’s currently hitting .184 on balls in play or BABIP. Teixeira’s career average BABIP is .309 , and his previous two years have been .344 and .321. Absolutely nothing is dropping for Teixeira, and it blows my mind that he hasn’t over-reacted and started forcing it. Teixeira’s still striking out around his career average of 20% and he’s actually increased his walk-rate a few percentage-points up to 16%. His discipline hasn’t changed, but the numbers say that his swing may have. Teixeira is only hitting 10% of his hits for line-drives which is painful considering Teixeira hasn’t finished the season with a LD% lower than 19.8%.
Where are all these line-drives going, you ask? Straight to fly-balls at a 57.1% rate– Which may well indicate Mr. Teixeira’s aimin’ for the fences, and may actually be pressing. However, it’s not like Teixeira’s swinging at more pitches, inside or outside of the zone. Teixeira’s making contact at a career-average rate — so what gives?
Well, he’s just in a funk. I’m going to take six year’s worth of All-Star calibre production over a bad April when evaluating a player, Every Single Time!
There’s no reason to believe that Teixeira will continue hitting fly-balls at a 60 percent clip, as he’s one of the better pure hitters in the game. Teixeira’s 7 Home Runs might make it difficult to acquire him, but he’s still very close to top-10 talent which is saying a lot considering the depth at first base.
