I'm back in Minnesota, and it's been a long night of Mario Kart and Guitar Hero (and Blades of Steel) with Theory, Dr. Acula, Pee Wee, and LunnDale, yet I still feel like blogging despite it being 2am because of an extremely disturbing text message I received from Snacks. It read as follows, "Nick Punto is awesome and I want to make out with him" or something similar. Basically, Snackspunto wanted to know if Nick Punto was actually good, and his opinion was "yes." I'm going to look at it, and let's just say, the conclusions I'm making here are very surprising and make me kind of angry and tired.
First thing first, let me state that Punto is an awesome fielder. Whether it is third, second, or short, the dude is outstanding with the glove. He threw some donkey out at first today from short on a nubbed ball that when hit my first thought was "don't even throw it." I have full on respect for him in the field.
Hitting? I wouldn't think so, but let's see. I know, he's currently hitting .320. Good for him. There are two stats I like to look at to see how accurate the batting average is as a measure of how a player is acutally, hitting - Batting Average on Balls in Play, and Line Drive percentage. His BABIP is .369, which is pretty high, an average player comes in at .300, so he's definitely high, but not ridiculously so. In another post I mentioned how line drive percentage has a rough correlation to batting average. Well, Punto hits a line drive 23.5% of the time this season. That comes out to an expected batting average of .355, so it seems hes' actually a wee bit unlucky this year. Not an expected result.
What about last year, when he had the absolute worst season of any regular player? His BABIP was only .257 and his expected batting average was .266, so he really was as bad as his numbers show. The good year he had in '06, .338 and .356. So he was good that year, not lucky. Which is the real Punto?
It turns out he's always had a very high Line Drive %, in his career he is at 20.8%, which comes out to an expected BA of .328. So was last year just a negative anamoly? It's kind of looking like it. God I hate praising Punto, especially with all that faggy sliding into first he does.
- How funny is this whole Favre thing? Totally predictable too. And now the Packer sare in a horrid situation. If they bring him back, they derail their whole plan, and if they release him he could sign with some other team. What a complete mess.
- I'm very tired
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
1 comment:
I didn't think Punto walked much but I just looked it up and he walks an average amount. He's no Delmon anyways. But he does have no power, you could almost say he's Tyner-esque. So he has to hit at a high average to be valuable and you just can't count on that.
Post a Comment