Go to the middle section of stats, look at K% and subtract from 1. Thus, in 2003 his contact rate was “1 - 24.9%” or 75.1%, which is pretty low, the minimum you want to see in a hitter. 2004 he missed most of the season, so don’t bother. In 2005, 29.9% means 70.1% contact rate. In 2006, 26.1% means 73.9% contact rate. And this year, 22.4% or 77.6%, the best contact rate in years, so it means that he is actually putting more balls into play, about 25 more balls than last year if he continues at this rate. For his career, 26.4% means 73.6% contact rate, so he’s hitting above this year.

Ishikawa has been struggling in Dodd Stadium - which I’ve shown to be a stadium detrimental to power hitters - but has been clobbering the ball around in San Jose, just as good as he did two seasons ago, which means that he didn’t lose his hitting skills, it was just being masked by the stinkage that is Dodd Stadium.

According to a study I’ve seen, they found that typically - for pitchers - their HR/FlyBall ratio will regress to the mean of 10%. I assume that for hitters, something similar to BABIP happens: a hitter establishes his own level that he regresses to.

Here’s the BABIP’s for the players you listed.

BABIP’s for Aurilia, Roberts, Durham, and Vizquel

Aurilia - .270 (Career BABIP of .297)
Roberts - .310 (Career BABIP of .302)
Durham - .261 (Career BABIP of .310)
Vizquel - .276 (Career BABIP of .299)

Aurilia and Vizquel are getting close to their career BABIP’s while Durham is still the furthest away from the players you’ve listed. Durhams LD% has taken a hit this year too (16.7% in 2006 and just 11% this year which is terrible). What’s hurting Durham the most is that he’s hitting more flyballs this year and they aren’t leaving the park like they were last year. In 2006 16% of Durhams flyballs left the park compared to just 6.6% this year, thats a huge drop.

Meanwhile, Roberts is actually considered “lucky” this year in terms of his BABIP, he’s both exceeding the league average and his own career average.

The difference between these Giants and Sexson, is that Sexson is vastly under his career BABIP and the league average. Durham, Vizquel, and Aurilia should see a slight correction in their numbers this year but Sexson should have the biggest correction, if it happens.

You’re right that hitters tend to have more influence on their own BABIP than pitchers do. For example, Derek Jeter has a career BABIP of .364. Sexson’s career BABIP is .299, so he’s still underperformed on that area this year.

Thanks for the hitter BABIP correction, I should have been more clear in what I was trying to say. The average BABIP for hitters tends to be around .300 in MLB.

I agree on the LD%, which I noted originally, if I recall correctly it’s the lowest it’s ever been for Sexson, since we both know that line drives go for hits about 75% of the time it’s easy to see why Sexson has scuffled this year. Lower LD%, horrible BABIP = a bad year.

I don’t like players like Sexson with basically one skill set, once he starts to age and lose bat speed, he’s going to have a hard time. I would be interested to look at Sexson’s contact rate this year and previous years, do you know of a resource with contact rate stats?

I’m not sure what to think of Ishikawa anymore, he’s struggled in the minors and I’m not sure if he’s deserving of a call up right now. I also thought he was hurt right now or something?

Here is an analysis of Sexson by Ron Shandler for ESPN Insider (probably subscription needed so I’ll highlight): http://insider.espn.go.com/fantasy/baseball/flb/story?page=shandler717

He goes over Sexson’s component skills and finds that his BABIP this year is much lower than the past three years (hitters tend to stick to mean of recent history) and that his line drive% is down also, from 18% to 14%, which means less hits as line drives becomes hits much more often than GB or FB. Improvements in both would increase his second half stats.

Also, his component skills - BB%, CT%, PX, xBA (walk rate, contact rate, power index he uses, and expected BA) - are actually better first half of 2007 vs. 2006, so he is actually ahead this year of where he was last year and last year he hit .308 BA, 20 HR and 52 RBI in the second half. Plus he hit .337 after August 1st.

“Given that his underlying skills are still right in line with his career marks, there’s reason to believe Sexson will rebound again in 2007 — perhaps not to last year’s lofty levels, but at least to his usual standards. Acquiring him at a discount from a discouraged owner now could pay off nicely for your team down the stretch.”

Of course, this is for fantasy baseball, but it could apply to reality as well. The Giants could trade for him to get his value and then either trade him again in the off-season, after presumably losing Morris’s salary in the trade, and get good prospects for him once he brings up his overall numbers, or he could just be our 1B in 2008, he provides right-handed power that we currently don’t have, but probably doesn’t play 1B that well and you know Sabean loves the defense at 1B (Snow and Niekro were good 1B). Then we get picks for him in 2009 draft.

McClain is OK, but at 35, he’s the Brian Dallimore of 2007, he won’t do much up here and if he did, it won’t be for long. I would rather bring up Ishikawa again and see what he can do, at least we know he’ll play good defense there and maybe he can learn something from the lefties on our team, Bonds, Roberts, Klesko in particular, since they both walk a lot and hit for power. If Niekro wasn’t injured again, I would platoon him with Ishikawa up here once Klesko is traded.

Ishikawa’s not a premier prospect anymore, but his hitting in San Jose indicates that whatever hitting skills he had before goint to AA was not lost in Connecticut, just buried under the crud of their stadium. Just play him up here and see how he does, maybe he’ll be like Brandon Webb, can’t do much down in the minors, but come up to the majors and do well. Probably not, but at least we’ll be playing some sort of a prospect with some potential, instead of a washed up AAAA minor leaguer like McClain (no offense intended).

And if he doesn’t do well, he’ll get some more MLB experience, maybe hunger for it more, giving him more motivation, and we start him in AAA next season. He’s still only 23 years old, so it’s not like there couldn’t be more development time before bringing him up, there are plenty of prospects who take until 25-26 before shining in the majors, so you never know.