Portland State, BABIP and ISO

by James MacKenzie
Vanguard staff

A quick introduction: I'm James MacKenzie and I write for the sports section in the Vanguard. This is what I hope to be the first in a running series of posts that will analyze the Portland State softball team through sabermetric analysis, a field in which softball is sorely lacking.

Sabermetrics are so absent from softball, that when you type it into Google it asks, "did you mean: football sabermetrics?" Which is a pity, because really, doesn't softball in all of its similarity to baseball, deserve to be picked apart, scrutinized and analyzed with every stupid number one can throw at it in the same way that baseball is? I would answer that it does and that's the aim here. 

I would, however, like to add the caveat that since sabermetrics are absent from softball in most available statistical archives, I have derived most of the statistics used here from my own work provided by the raw statistics available at goviks.com. That being said, I'd like to say that I am an amateur statistician at best and as always when you read things on the internet, take it with a grain a salt.

Through twelve games, it's safe to say that Portland State's offensive production has been nothing short of putrid. The raw slash line of .212/.290/.260 is rough, as is the .550 OPS it amounts too. Portland State ranks second to last in batting average and slugging in the Pacific Coast Softball Conference ahead of only Santa Clara and ranks third to last in on-base percentage. Quite simply, the Vikings aren't hitting.


The question than after twelve games and two early season tournaments, is what to expect from the Viking lineup heading forward. Coach Echo-Hawk is confident that the record isn't indicative of the talent level of the club and there are a couple of advanced metrics that suggest that even if the offense peaks at mediocre, that it should be sufficient given the caliber of the pitching staff this year.

Batting average on balls in play (BABIP), as defined by "The Hardball Times," is "a measure of the number of batted balls that safely fall in for a hit (not including home runs). The exact formula we use is (H-HR)/(AB-K-HR+SF)." When used against a league average, BABIP is useful in determining the amount of luck, or lack thereof that a team (or player) has encountered when hitting. 

Since BABIP nearly always hovers between .290 and .300 in professional baseball, it can be assumed than in that environment a player that hits .330 on balls in play will regress to the mean BABIP and that vice versa, when a batter hits .270 on balls in play, that this will regress upwards as well. There are of course exceptions, as line drive hitters consistently have higher BABIPS, as line drives fall for hits more often and other random events can affect BABIP (growing old, losing power and sucking the chief among them).

With the run scoring environment of softball significantly more volatile than baseball, (infield hits go for singles more often, the shorter base paths cause quicker plays leading to more errors, etc) it shouldn't come as a big surprise that the 2009 league average BABIP in the PCSC was approximately .311. 

I determined league average as the mean of nine of the ten PCSC teams (three teams 2009 stats are currently unavailable), so this is by no means a hard league average. With nine teams contributing to the average however, it's a quick and dirty way to figure out a point of comparison.

In 2010, the Vikings have a BABIP of .262. Against a 2010 league average of .300, it's clear that Portland State has experienced a fair amount of what could be called bad luck. This is in part true, as Portland State has already faced three top-15 ranked teams in UCLA, Arizona State and California and fared poorly in all three. In those three losses combined, Portland State had four hits, seven walks and an eye-popping twenty strikeouts.

Those three losses (.125 BABIP), combined with two losses to Cal Poly where the offense failed, explain Portland State's low season BABIP quickly. It'll be a matter of time until we see if Portland State can hang around with those teams competitively, but it's fairly obvious that those three games heavily impact Portland State's poor offensive performance. Given Portland State's 2009 BABIP of .316 and the league average rate which right now seems to hover between .300 and .310, Portland State should continue to regress toward the mean in BABIP, dragging with it other stat categories.

However, while quality of competition and bad luck in part explain Portland State's inability to score runs thus far, it doesn't quite explain why Portland State has such a low BABIP and such an ugly raw batting line. Despite Portland State's poor hitting, in part fueled by a low BABIP, the Vikings have still managed to reach base at a .290 clip, which although bad is certainly understandable in context to a .212 batting average. 

Portland State has gotten runners aboard but when they get on, they haven't been able to score.

A large part of this inability to score runs has been a decided lack of power displayed by Portland State this season. It took nine games for the team to hit their first home run (a two-run shot by Daniell Lynn against UC Davis) and through twelve, Portland state has only eleven doubles. 

Five of those doubles belong to Becca Diede, who with Brandi Scoggins and Daniell Lynn has accounted for the majority of Portland States extra base hits. Isolated power, a stat which measure's a batter's raw power through extra bases per at bat, shows just how little Portland State has hit for power so far in 2010. In 2010, Portland State's ISO has been a barely visible .048. 

Prior to the season, much was made of the Viking's losing five starters from last year’s club and thus far in 2010, those fears have been somewhat justified as Portland State has yet to replace the production of Jackie Heide (12 HR, .248 ISO,), Jenna Wilson (13 2B, .158 ISO) and Jana Rae Slayton (7 HR, .166 ISO).

A lot than rides on Portland State regaining some semblance of the power stroke they had last year. Thus far, Portland State hasn't shown that they can replace that lost production, but the season is only twelve games old. Portland State will most assuredly not have a .048 ISO come year’s end, and the clubs batting line, despite the loss of last year’s big bats, should at the very least regress to league average due to Portland State's low BABIP. 

Portland State has played some of the toughest competition it's faced in a long time in its two opening tournaments and as play moves forward and conference games against teams of similar talent levels resumes, Portland State should have just enough offense for their pitching to pull them through.