Matt Wise is Special?

[gregmag]

I love Wise, but remember that BABIP is a very luck-heavy stat. I don't know enough about this to have an opinion about how much pitchers can control BABIP at the margin, but we do know that both hitters and pitchers tend to regress toward the BABIP mean. This suggests that we should expect Wise to be not quite so effective next year.

 

Greg.

[rluzinski]

Can we get this thread moved to the statistical forum?

 

I don't think Wise's low BABIP is just luck. As I mentioned in the the Podcast thingy, knuckballers and pitchers with very slow changeups have exhibited a statistically significant ability to have a consistantly low BABIP. They almost HAVE to, if you think about it.

 

Pitchers can only do 3 main things to be successful:

 

* Not walk batters

* K batters

* Have a low BABIP

 

Many soift-tossers / knuckballers aren't going to strikeout out alot of guys. If they don't have a low BABIP they probably can't be a MLB pitcher for long.

 

BTW, Ohka's low BABIP in Washington was probably mostly luck