A New Perspective

So far, we've been using Batter Impact to look at individual players, especially those among the top 25 batters in the league. However, for the last week, I've been experimenting with Batter Impact as a tool to look at teams as a whole. In this post, I'll show you some of the interesting things I've discovered and share some of my predictions for the rest of the season.

I first began to look at a statistic which I'm calling Team Batter Impact, essentially the sum of the individual BIs for each player on a given team. I looked to see if there was a correlation between Team BI and Winning Percentage. A scatterplot is shown below.

There seemed to be a decent correlation between Team BI and Win Percentage for all 30 teams. A few outliers were of course present (namely the Giants, Brewers, Braves, and Cubs), but we'll get to those shortly.

6 Week Summary - Tulowitzki On Fire

Troy Tulowitzi is off to a start unlike any other player in baseball. He's posting the highest batting average (.391), OBP (.497) and slugging percentage (.750) of any player in baseball and no other batter is even close. According to FanGraphs, he also has the highest WAR in baseball with 3.6 wins above replacement, 1.3 more than the next closest challenger, Mike Trout. But what's been most impressive for me has been his astronomical batter impact.

Right now, his Batter Impact is sitting at 26.9763, a full 5 points above Giancarlo Stanton, the nextbest batter as measured by Total BI. To put that in perspective, Chris Colabello is 5 points higher than Ryan Howard in the middle of the standings. Here's the top 25 (click to enlarge):