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Originally Posted by andymac
So, basically, we are finding out that a pitcher has control over even less than what we thought before? Basically only strikeouts, walks, & whether the ball is hit in the air or on the ground?
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Here's a little bit... the significance of which escaped me the first time around... If you look at the correlation coefficient for popups for pitchers and hitters... they're .5 and .6 respectively.
I put 2 and 2 together before for the hitters and realized how this affects BABIP as 98% of popups are caught for outs (contrast that with 25% of line drives). However, I'm now realizing that this is really the one known way that pitchers can and do control BABIP as there is a significant relationship from year to year with a pitchers' ability to induce popups.
Voros McCracken's initial findings were that knuckleballers tended to have a lower BABIP. Earlier this year I also remember reading a study on Baseball Prospectus that talked about how some guys who have a good change up tended to have a lower BABIP.
Looking at Tim Wakefield (career BABIP of .283), his popup per fly ball numbers are consistently above average. While Mariano Rivera doesn't have an outstanding changeup, he's a guy that controls his BABIP by inducing many popups as well.
Just thought I'd toss this out there given the continual trend finding evidence that pitchers don't control much. This is a finding in the opposite direction. I'd actually like to see a study done between popup% and line drive% (for both hitters and pitchers). I wonder if there's a negative relationship between the two. I think I'm going to shoot an email to David Gassko regarding this.
Edit: nevermind that last part about the relationship between LD% and Popup%... I just took a cursory glance at some of the LD% numbers versus IFFB% numbers and there really appears to be zero relationship between the two. It was a nice thought, though!