Alex Carnevale at Baseball Prospectus looks at seasonal variation in batting average on balls in play for hitters. It’s a good writeup, but fails to address two issues:
1. Doubles and triples. Are they equally variable year to year as singles, which we know tend to vary more annually even for hitters than other hitting skills?
2. Home parks. It’s funny, everybody with any sabermetric background knows to apply home field adjustments to a player’s overall statistics, but suddenly we forget that when doing partial statistical analyses like BABIP. Is BABIP more, or less, affected by home parks than other components of offense? Carnevale doesn’t say, and I suspect probably it is affected quite a bit. I ask this in particular because he identifies Carlos Beltran and Carlos Delgado as two players likely to improve this season because they had lower than usual BABIP last year – but every Mets fan knows that Beltran and Delgado had massive home/road splits, hitting far better on the road, whereas both had spent their careers through 2004 in hitter-friendly AL parks. (Delgado is also 35 and recovering from offseason surgery – fantasy league buyers, beware!).
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One thing that I don’t think this stat acocunts for is the batter who sacrifices himself. Whether is by bunting, attempting a hit and run or just taking enough pitches that he puts himself in a hole. There are many hitters, usually #2 in the order, that do this well and are penalized in their personal stats for the better of the team.