Littleton Added on MiLB Contract
Littleton is a sidearmer whom you probably remember from the Rangers organization where he got scattered big league appearances in 2006-8. Two winters ago, he was traded to the Red Sox for a PTBNL, and Boston turned around DFA’d him early in the next spring, leaving him to be picked up by the Brew Crew. He spent ’09 in their org, but fared poorly, with nearly eleven hits and eight walks per nine innings. It was over just 45.2 innings total, split between double and triple-A, but suffice to say it didn’t make him a hot commodity this winter.
In his debut campaign, Littleton was a rather interesting pitcher, despite velocity only in the high-80s complemented by a high-70s change. His super-low batting average on balls in play (.196!) was a concern, combined with only 17 Ks in 36.1 innings, but he mitigated that getting four grounders for every fly and, at the time, no one was squaring up against him. Subsequent returns to the league have been much worse overall, even as his Ks got up to a comfortable level. One odd note is that it seemed that in ’08, his fastball had more horizontal movement than ever, while his change was lagging behind.
As his ’09 campaign was a disaster, I wouldn’t expect much of him out of the gate. Working with Rick Adair again may prove helpful to him, but he was up and down in his time with the Rangers too. As a sidearmer, he’s not good against left-handers, so that’s working against him. He’s extra insurance to keep around if neither Texeira nor White can hack it and no one else steps up.
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7 Responses to “Littleton Added on MiLB Contract”
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The way I look at it the more the merrier.
jay sez:
Okay, maybe I don’t get BABIP, but isn’t a really low BABIP a good thing? Or does that just indicate that he gives up lots of walks, because the ball is seldom put in play? Or what?
In short, why is a “super low” BABIP a “concern”?
I’ll throw the formula in here as a conceptual thing, here…
BABIP = (Hits – Home runs) / (At-bats – Strikeouts – Home runs + Sacrifice flies)
I’ll bet someone around here can explain the whole thing better than I can, but extremes of BABIP are quite difficult to maintain, and particularly so for pitchers. There are only a meagre few for which one can expect a below-average BABIP, year in, year out, and even when it happens, it’s not too distant from the norm, which is .290. It’s something that is derived from luck and defense more than skill, in most cases.
Littleton’s .196 number is not something that can be sustained because it’s way outside the realm of reasonable expectations. Even his being the .350s last year would be considered a bit too high. So, factoring regression, you could expect that his hit numbers would come up in the coming season and not continue on at a similar rate. This also means that 1.73 ERA he ran that same year was not representative of his true abilities, but you probably gathered as much already.
The cool thing about BABIP as Jay points out is that it can be used to answer the question: is this really a true talent of a particular player or is there other factors at work such as luck. The ability of a player to square up a baseball is way more difficult than say a basketball player to sink a jump shot. There is more variability in squaring up a curve ball… more luck involved. Other things are at play as well…. defense, park dementions, official scorer (hit vs. error).
Few players maintain BABIB in the extremes they will usually regress toward the mean. Conversely if a pitcher has a high BABIP we can speculate that he has been unlucky and may expect improvement
Some players can maintain it Ichiro! for example has posted consistent crazy BABIP numbers. 369/344/333/399/316/348/389/334/384 which reflect his ability to square up the ball and get to first before a play can be made.
On the pitching side it is difficult to maintain extremes Felix Hernandez, and Roy Halladay for example are both pretty close to the average of 290-300. Halladay: 279/304/293/313. It is hard for pitchers to “miss bats”.
I hope that makes sense as this is my first attempt to help explain such a concept.
“It is hard for pitchers to “miss batsâ€.”
Well, it is for the non-Felix/Harden/Lincecum pitchers.
BABIP focuses solely on what happens after a ball’s been hit, so missed bats doesn’t really enter into it. In a sentence, very few pitchers seem to have a ‘skill’ in limiting batting average on balls in play, so for almost all pitchers, you can assume that their BABIP next year will be in that .285-.305 range. Will some fall outside that range? Absolutely. A great defense or a terrible defense will have a big effect. But if a pitcher allows a BABIP under .200, then he’s in line for some serious regression (same if his BABIP was over .400). That is, he got lucky. So yes, it’s great for Littleton that he allowed a .196 BABIP way back when, but we would assume that he wasn’t as good as his raw statistics showed, and in fact that’s what we saw.
Thanks Marc, I was thinking more in terms of nearly missing bats, weakly grounding out, but what i wrote was confusing…and wrong.
Thanks, all. That’s helpful: it hearkens back to my previous life as a statistician. Sure, it’s useful to have a point estimate of some parameter, but it’s a lot more useful to have both an estimate and a sense of variance in that parameter.
I infer from the above that, say, a successful sinker-ball pitcher will consistently have a relatively low BABIP, because he’s not TRYING to miss bats, but rather, to get balls in play and have them be ground outs. A power pitcher like Felix will probably have a fairly unimpressive BABIP simply because so few balls are put in play.
It’s great to have knowledgeable, articulate fans here. Thanks for the explanation!