Brett Gardner has been slumping; there is no argument against that fact. It’s easy for recent play to cloud our judgement and change our views of a player, because that is what is fresh in our minds. Yesterday, Ben Kabak discussed Gardner’s slump over at River Avenue Blues. He starts with a very important disclaimer, that “It’s a dangerous exercise to split a player’s season into smaller bits and pieces and then draw conclusions from them. Small sample size issues abound, and a player is generally the overall sum of his parts by the team the season ends.”
Honestly, I think that’s the main take away from the entire post, but I thought it’d be worthwhile to look into the numbers a little bit more. Here are the splits Ben chose to use:
His line to start the season was inflated heavily by his BABIP, and it was very predictable that his numbers would drop. Over the next 40 or so days, Gardner continued to put up terrific numbers. Since then, he’s been terrible for the Yankees. However, I don’t think the downward trend is as bad as it looks.
I used The Hardball Times xBABIP calculator to calculate an expected BABIP for Gardner during each of these portions of the 2010 season. The three numbers I got were .323, .323, and .331 respectively. I then went on to “neutralize” Gardner’s numbers with these expected BABIPs. Here are the new lines:
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