Is John Bowker Unlucky?

Published by on June 9, 2008 | 4 Responses

After watching the Nationals game on Sunday and watching Bowker hit the ball hard into some outs, I wondered, is John Bowker unlucky?

To figure this out I checked John Bowker’s FanGraphs stats page and noticed something, he’s hitting a bunch of line drives. In 154 PA’s this year, Bowker’s LD% is at 26.4% which is very solid. Check out the leaders in the National League for LD%.

LD% Leaders in the National League Min. 150 PA’s.

Name	          Team	   BABI  GB/FB	 LD% 
Ryan Ludwick	Cardinals  0.34	  0.55	30.30%
Brian Schneider	Mets	   0.3	  4.86	28.10%
Miguel Tejada	Astros	   0.32	  1.36	27.20%
Gregor Blanco	Braves	   0.34	  1.84	26.80%
Chipper Jones	Braves	   0.43	  1.2	26.40%
John Bowker	Giants	   0.28	  0.72	26.40%
Matt Kemp	Dodgers	   0.4	  1.44	25.90%
Xavier Nady	Pirates	   0.35	  1.17	25.70%
Ryan Church	Mets	   0.35	  1.17	25.50%
Jimmy Rollins	Phillies   0.29	  1.52	25.50%

Of course, 150 PA’s is a small-ish sample size but John Bowker is hitting line drives on par with Chipper Jones. Why are line drives such a good thing? Because of the three types of contact a hitter can make — groundball, flyball, and line drive — the line drive is the best type because they fall for hits 75% of the time. Hitters that hit a bunch of line drives tend to have high averages and good seasons. Garrett Atkins lead the National League in ’07 with a LD% of 24.5%, his final line of that year was: (.301/.367/.486) he was helped by the large amount of line drives that he hit.

You’ll notice that on our leader board everyone is sporting an average-to-high BABIP, except for Jimmy Rollins and John Bowker. Chipper Jones’ BABIP is currently .420 and a large part of that is because he’s hitting a ton of line drives this year. But Bowker’s BABIP is only .280, which is very low for the amount of line drives he’s hitting. In fact, Bowker’s current line of: (.248/.299/.411) looks very ordinary, definitely below average for a first baseman. You can crudely figure out expected BABIP (xBABIP) by taking a hitters LD% and adding .12 to it.

By this method, Bowker’s BABIP should be closer to .384 than the current BABIP of .284. All things being equal, Bowker is hitting a lot better than his current slash-stats indicate. The Hardball Times has a useful stat called PrOPS that can help us with John Bowker. Here’s the definition and what it can tell us.

PrOPS stands for “Predicted OPS.” It was developed by J.C. Bradbury amd introduced in this article. PrOPS isn’t really a new stat; it’s a formula for predicting what a player’s OPS is likely to be in the future based on his batted balls, strikeouts, home runs and walks.

PrOPS takes batted balls — remember line drives are one of the three types of batted ball –, K’s, HR’s, and BB’s and will tell you what a hitters line “should” look like in the future. By using the PrOPS metric, Bowker’s line should be closer to (.291/.331/.496) that’s good for an OPS of .834. That batting line and OPS would make John Bowker one of the best hitting Giants first basemen since JT Snow’s 2004 season in which he went crazy. Instead Bowker’s current OPS is .709, or -.124 under his predicted OPS. That’s the biggest difference on the Giants among any hitter with 150 PA’s or more.

To answer my question, yes, John Bowker has been a little unlucky this year. He’s hitting a ton of line drives and that’s always a good thing for hitters. If he can keep his LD% fairly high, you should start to see his overall numbers improve. Hopefully the Giants will keep sending him out there because he’s squaring up nicely on some balls right now. Keep an eye on Bowker.

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Chris
Chris

>> Bowker’s got 2 things working against him that indicate his hits are the less effective kind of LD: he hits far fewer GB’s than any of the other guys at the top of that list, suggesting more elevation from his swing-path (more elevation obviously leads to more outs); and like several other guys with high LD% and relatively low BABIP (Rollins, Schneider, Hafner among them) Bowker has a high IFFB%, suggesting he’s more prone to those tweener kinds of line drives that don’t quite have the juice to get through the infield. Hitting fewer ground balls is probably a good thing for Bowker. Flyballs tend to create more runs than groundballs. Guys without really good speed, Bowker would be one of them, benefit more from hitting the ball into the air. Speedier guys like Rollins can get away with hitting the ball on the ground more because they'll occasionally beat them out. Schneiders stats are REALLY goofy, he's hitting a bunch of line drives but also a TON of balls on the ground. Schneider being a catcher with poor speed, hasn't benefited from his large amount of LD's because he's putting the ball on the ground so much. That might explain his low BABIP. This year he's hit 68 groundballs, 32 line drives, and just 14 flyballs. I would say because of Rollins' speed and his LD rate, that he's also been a little unlucky this year. His xBABIP is .375. As for your theory of LD's and IFFB, I honestly can't say much because I don't know how Baseball Info Solutions differentiates between a LD and an IFFB but I know it has to do with trajectories. I don't think I've personally seen anything in Bowker's line drives that make them look drastically different from other players. If I had to guess, I'd say that Bowker is popping up the ball more on the infield as opposed to hitting weak line drives.

MrLomez
MrLomez

Very interesting. Awesome stuff. I think part of the discrepancy between Bowker's LD% and BABIP is something that OGC alluded to above - not all line drives are created equal. Baseball Info Solutions doesn't as of yet distinguish between types of LD's when they create this data. Soft liners and fliners (not the most exacting terms, I know) are grouped together with your more standard frozen rope types of LD's. This is obviously problematic since the effectiveness of 1 kind of hit is far different than the effectiveness of another. Bowker's got 2 things working against him that indicate his hits are the less effective kind of LD: he hits far fewer GB's than any of the other guys at the top of that list, suggesting more elevation from his swing-path (more elevation obviously leads to more outs); and like several other guys with high LD% and relatively low BABIP (Rollins, Schneider, Hafner among them) Bowker has a high IFFB%, suggesting he's more prone to those tweener kinds of line drives that don't quite have the juice to get through the infield. And i think the above claims are supported by observation. Maybe it's just me, but Bowker's "line drives" tend to have a sort of looping trajectory that you just don't see off the bat of a guy like Rowand, say. Maybe Bowker is unlucky, but I think Bowker may just as likely be one of those consistent outliers as far as the LD% to BABIP correlation is concerned.

obsessivegiantscompu
obsessivegiantscompu

Great analysis! Very interesting, good catch, linedrives are usually the best in terms of outcome out of the variety of hits (grounder, flyball, linedrive), and yet Bowker is way below where he theoretically should be. Is there a way you can take his stats from Minor League Splits on g/f/l and so forth and calculate PrOPS for Bowker from last year in AA? If that is possible, it would be interesting to see if he had the same problem last season. If it repeats, then perhaps there are some types of linedrives that maybe aren't so productive.

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