Albert's slump

[Phyrkrakr]

I don't think anybody over here is too concerned about AP's slump, as he's bound to come out of it, but I just found fangraphs.com and did some looking. The results are definitely encouraging as far as AP pulling out of this slump sooner rather than later.

First off, he's hitting into a lot of bad luck. His career batting average on balls in play is .318. But right now, for this season, it's all the way down to .160, a drop off of more than 150 points. What that means is if his BABIP was up at career numbers, he'd have another five hits or so, which in 30 AB so far, would put his average at .333 and we wouldn't even be having this discussion.

Another interesting thing so far this year is that Albert is hitting a lot more balls on the ground than usual. Generally speaking, he's about 40% fly balls, 40% grounders, and 20% line drives (roughly, over his career). So far this year, he's only 7% line drives, and well over 50% grounders. Maybe he's swinging down on the ball more, or just topping a lot more pitches than usual, but whatever it is, he's hitting the ball into the ground and he's not fast enough to beat it out.

Now remember, all of this is small sample size stuff, as the guy's only had 30 at bats so far. But the bottom line is he's hitting a lot more stuff on the ground and into hard luck than just not making any contact at all.

[jim]

I haven't seen every atbat, but it seems to me that he isn't taking pitches to the opposite field. He is one of the best opp. field hitters in the game, it looks like he is trying to pull everything.

AP LD% is 6.7%, which would mean his EBABIP would be .187. He's simply not hitting the ball.

[skmsw]

First off, he's hitting into a lot of bad luck. His career batting average on balls in play is .318. But right now, for this season, it's all the way down to .160 . . . that means is if his BABIP was up at career numbers, he'd have another five hits or so . . . So far this year, he's only 7% line drives, and well over 50% grounders.

BABIP is not random. Certainly there is a chance element to it, but it is not random. So we can't just assume that he is hitting in bad luck because his BABIP is low; to decide that, we have to look at the rest of the evidence. Right now, he is hitting line drives 7% of the time; based on that, we should expect that his BABIP would be low, because the balls he is putting in play are not particularly well hit.

Line drives fall for hits about 75% of the time; grounders go for hits about 30% of the time. So if he is hitting fewer line drives and more grounders, we should expect fewer hits. And that assumes that the grounders he is hitting are "his normal" grounders; given his slump, and what we've seen, we should not be assuming that. He's not hitting sharp grounders and getting nailed on close plays; he's hitting very routine grounders. So we'd expect his BABIP to be even lower still.

Personally, I do not take much bad news out of such a small sample; the poor performance in a handful of games is what it is, and nothing more. But I'd also say that the only good thing the numbers tell us is ALSO that the "problem" has not been going on for very long. I don't think they are revealing some hidden cause for optimism that he's doing better than the numbers look or is just a victim of bad luck.

[Magneto]

To quote someone else

"I think that they did a good job explaining it on the Cardinals post game show lastnight. Albert has went through slumps like this before but it usually happens in the middle of the season and is padded by the rest of his numbers so you don't notice it as much. This year it is happening at the beginning of the season so his numbers look bad and it sticks out. "

Oh and in 2004 he went 28 for 104 during a stretch of the season.

[JohnnyJay]

Is it just me, or does he seem to be hitting more ground balls right now than actually just driving the ball?

In any case, if there is one person that is working harder to figure this out right now, it's Albert.