Establishing NCAA BABIP
Last year, I did some work with trying to compare the Huskers’ stats to their peers. As some of you are already familiar, I’m a big fan of batting average on balls in play (BABIP). The problem is, as far as I’ve been able to find, there hasn’t been any work done to establish a standard for BABIP at the collegiate level.
You might ask, “Surely we know about BABIP at the minor and major league level, can’t we just use those numbers?”
Initially I though we might be able to. After taking a quick glance at the early numbers I was running, I noticed that the average BABIP for a team was much higher than I expected.
In the Majors, it’s widely considered average if a BABIP is about .290. Anything above or below that is more or less luck, and unsustainable. Unless we’re talking about extreme groundball pitchers, or knuckleballers, who can control it to an extent. But that’s neither here nor there. We’re talking about college kids with aluminum bats hitting…
Wait a second, there it is. Aluminum bats are the key. There’s been much said about baseballs having an unusually high speed off of aluminum bats, as compared to wood. Perhaps that can account for the difference in BABIP.
I’ve only run the numbers for the Big 12 so far, but it appears that over the past four years, league BABIP for the Big 12 is a staggering .340, a mark 50 points higher than MLB.
| BABIP | |
| 2003 | .340 |
| 2004 | .342 |
| 2005 | .338 |
| 2006 | .344 |
The BABIP for the Huskers for each of those years is the following:
| BABIP | |
| 2003 | .340 |
| 2004 | .312 |
| 2005 | .340 |
| 2006 | .343 |
Interesting, but not conclusive. Yet. I’ll get back to you when I’ve finished compiling and running the numbers for all of NCAA baseball last year.