I’m definitely catching Puig fever, as a look at his statistics makes me even more impressed with his start. At the moment, he owns a .513 BABIP. That number becomes more impressive when you realize that his line drive rate isn’t that high. Twenty-one percent is good, but it’s hardly unusual. Over 50% of his balls in play are on the ground. For a pitcher that would be pretty good, as we would expect a lot of those to be turned into outs. That’s not happening with Puig. His grounders are finding holes. On top of that, he hasn’t popped up on the infield yet, and 1/3 of his fly balls have left the park. All in all, he’s seeing the ball and hitting it hard.
My other line of thinking this morning is on how much Puig will regress. While he is off to a very good start, it’s unlikely that he is intrinsically a .400 hitter. FanGraphs publishes Steamer projections for the season, updated based on results in 2013. That currently has him going 74 for 298 the rest of the season, a .275 BA. That’s not much different than their .274 prediction coming into the season. The probability of a .275 hitter going 47/106, however is 0.00015, or about 1 in 6700.
Another way of looking for the lower bound is to ask, “What is the lowest BA that would put a 47 for 106 in a 95% confidence interval?” The answer is .347. That BA would produce a 95% confidence interval from 27 to 47. If you go to a 99% confidence interval, the lowest batting average that produces an upper bound of 47 is .320.
One last data point comes from running Marcels on Puig’s season so far. That predicts a .294 BA for him next year.
So we have a lower limit of .275 based on Steamer and an upper limit of .347 based on a 95% confidence interval that would produce his hits so far. Splitting the difference puts him at .311. The Dodgers will gladly take that.
I don’t think anybody’s noticed this yet, but last night I saw the craziest thing about his day-by-day stats. Maybe it’s not so crazy (cuz these are small sample sizes), but it seems it to me….
.500 BA – 6/03 – 6/10 (33 PA)
.367 BA – 6/11 – 6/25 (53 PA)
.520 BA – 6/26 – 7/02 (26 PA)
…it could be argued that he was in a slump in mid-June, and nobody realized it.
Now THAT would be nice for Dodgers fans, Devon!
At the risk of provoking tantrums from the allergic to sabermetrics dinosaurs from last year’s Cabrera/Trout AL MVP debate, Puig is currently tied for 21st among NL position players in WAR–and if he stays remotely near his current pace that will only improve (Manny Machado may reignite the debate from last year–he’s currently leading the AL & MLB as a whole with 5.2 WAR, just ahead of Cabrera’s 4.9.
M. Scott Eiland » Yes, his WAR is on a amazing pace.
on fangraphs, Machado “merely” ranks 7th in WAR at 4.2, well behind Cabrera’s MLB leading 5.4. Mike Trout is tied for 2nd at 4.6 with Chris Davis.
That seems a lot more common sense than baseball-reference that goes Machado then Cabrera then Carlos Gomez with Trout not even in the top 10. That’s probably because BR credits Machado with 2.6 WAR worth of defense this season. He’s great defensively, but something tells me he isn’t great enough to be worth nearly 6 wins on the season just from his glove.
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