Red Sox - a lot of bad luck so far

Hey, kudos to Michael Silverman of the Boston Herald, who has produced a statistically literate, relevant and useful article on the Red Sox early season troubles:

On both halves of the BABIP - batting average of balls in play - the Sox have been on the wrong side of the tracks.

BABIP, the newfangled metric, is a gauge on what happens to a ball when contact is made that results in a plate appearance. Home runs are taken out of the equation, so what a defender does, or does not do, with a ball hit to him is taken into account. With a typical BABIP of .290, the higher it is, the luckier the batter is and unluckier the pitcher is.

BABiP is something that I invented¹ several years ago, in order to look at defense. It has now been around enough for people to recognize it and understand what it is and how it works. But I wouldn't have expected to see it in the mainstream press yet. So that's a good job by Silverman.



¹ - OK, I probably didn't invent it. And Silverman certainly didn't get it from me. I probably had seen someone do that, or something like that, at some time previously. But I don't remember having seen it before I first derived it.