Maybe, maybe not. It's easy to say that BABIP for pitchers is purely luck but you look at all time greats like Santana or Pedro and they are well below the league average over the course of their whole career. Hard to chalk it all up to luck. In the same vein it's certainly possible for a pitchers BABIP to be inflated because he stinks and is getting rocked all over the park.
I can't get over him looking comfortable hitting to the opposite field; it's good to see that they can't use that retarded shift against him anymore.
According to baseball reference Santana is only 5 points below the MLB average for BAbip for his career, but he's more than 100 points below the OPS average. Even Pedro is only 16 points below the MLB average on BAbip, but is 146 below the OPS average. And there is absolutely NO way that Pelfrey was getting rocked all over the park - his slugging average against last year was only .393, 30 points below the league average (and it was only league average before that). His problem before last year (and in tonight's game) was throwing strikes.
I've got Santana at .277 career BABIP on baseball reference. One of us must be looking at the wrong thing. I wasn't talking about last year for Pelfrey either, I'm just saying there are reasons why his BABIP could have been higher than the league average other than luck. I can't find the numbers for line drive % but I'm betting Pelfrey's numbers in that category were much higher in 06-07 than last year.
They have the MLB number on Santana's page as .282, but I guess that's wrong. Pelfrey's line drive percentage was 20% in 2007 and 18% in 2008 (the MLB average is 19%). His other numbers in 2007 were almost all better than the MLB average, except for walk percentage, which was bad (11.4% versus the league average of 8.9%). I really don't see much evidence for anything that was his fault in 2007 other than poor control.
