Mets360 - Michael Conforto and the BABIP marks of the 2020 Mets

 

By Brian Joura October 24, 2020

The rule of thumb for BABIP is that a “normal” one is around the .300 mark. In our last full season of 2019, the MLB average BABIP was .298 or about as close to .300 as you can get. But what’s “normal” for the league is not necessarily normal for the individual. David Wright had a lifetime .339 BABIP while Ed Kranepool had a lifetime .271 mark in the category. If either of those players put up a .300 BABIP in a season, it would not be normal. It would be an underachieving year for Wright and a darn good one for Kranepool.

In 18 years in the majors, Kranepool posted a BABIP of .300 or better just three times and they came in consecutive seasons, from 1974-76. His high in PA during that stretch was 455, so it didn’t come in what we would consider a full season. Kranepool’s high in PA for a year came in 1965, when he came up 575 times. His BABIP that season? A .272 mark, which was essentially his lifetime average.

We should keep Kranepool in mind when looking at the BABIP marks of guys from 2020. The most PA of any player on the 2020 Mets was 239. The fewer PA you have, the easier it is to post an outrageous BABIP. When Kranepool posted a .335 BABIP in 1975, he didn’t establish a new level of performance but rather he experienced the hits falling in for him over a 357-PA sample. In 1977, he was back to a .270 mark in the category.

Player	2020 PA	2020 BABIP	Career PA	C BABIP
Pete Alonso	239	.242	932	.270
Michael Conforto	233	.412	2501	.305
J.D. Davis	229	.318	863	.322
Brandon Nimmo	225	.326	1309	.339
Jeff McNeil	209	.335	1024	.342
Dominic Smith	199	.368	728	.304
Robinson Cano	182	.319	9446	.318
Wilson Ramos	155	.271	3623	.298
Amed Rosario	147	.305	1564	.323

When Smith first made it up to the majors, he was viewed as a guy who wouldn’t hit a ton of homers but who would hit the ball from foul line to foul line and who would develop a little more over-the-fence power as he aged. Instead, he came up and hit 9 HR in 183 PA. But the hits didn’t fall in and he had just a .218 BABIP. The following year he posted a .297 BABIP and in 2019, it was .320, albeit in just 197 PA. Smith ended up with the same number of ABs in 2020 as he did in 2019. But he had six more hits, which upped his AVG 34 points. And that’s comparing to 2019, which was also above his career mark. Like Alonso, Smith hasn’t had enough PA in the majors for us to have a good idea of what his personal BABIP really is. We should feel confident that it’s not the .368 mark he put up in 2020. But it’s not impossible that it is the .320 he posted in 2019.The majority of hitters for the Mets performed more or less as expected in BABIP in the shortened season. The three exceptions were Alonso, Conforto and Smith. 

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