A continuation from yesterday's article; today we'll study the batted ball profiles of Jack Cust, Mark Ellis, Jack Hannahan, Dan Johnson and Mark Kotsay. Get ready for some highs and some lows, folks.

It was suggested in yesterday's piece that I post league average marks in the various stats, so I'll start off by reposting that information, as well as the statistical glossary. If you're reading these in sequence, just skip ahead to the first bolded player name.

Glossary

Basic breakdown: What kinds of balls are guys hitting? LD is Line Drive percentage. (Very, very good.) GB is ground ball percentage. (Bad, unless you're Ichiro or Maurice Greene.) OFB is outfield fly ball percentage. (Usually about average, but very bad if you're Juan Pierre or Reggie Willits.) IFB is infield fly ball percentage. (Very, very bad. These are almost always pop-ups or foul-outs.)

Results: What happens to the balls when they land? HR/FB is the percentage of fly balls which are home runs. (Most non-homer fly balls end up being outs, so this tells you a lot about whether a guy is benefiting or hurting his team by hitting flies.) BABIP is Batting Average on Balls in Play. (It's a key component of a player's batting average.) OCSlg is Slugging Percentage On Contact. (When a guy actually hits a ball, how hard does he hit it? If anyone's wondering, the difference between "In Play" and "On Contact" is that the latter includes home runs and the former doesn't.)

League Medians (Among Qualified Players)

Line Drive: 18.8%
Ground Ball: 42.0%
Outfield Fly Balls: 35.0%
Infield Fly Balls: 3.9%

Home Runs per Fly Ball: 10.0%
BABIP: .312

I don't know what the median is for OCSlg, because I calculated that by hand. I seem to recall working out that league average was about .520 not too long ago, however.

Now, the players:

Jack Cust

LD 23.2%
GB 42.2%
OFB 33.3%
IFB 1.3% (!)

HR/FB 31.7%
BABIP .366
OCSlg .861 (!!)

Jack Cust is a phenomenon.

There's really no other way to put it. On the one hand, he struck out in almost one third of his plate appearances this season. He whiffed completely on over 1/3 of his swings, according to THT. Boy howdy, though, that pitcher did NOT want to see him make contact.

Just to put things in context here, A-Rod's MVP season, in which he hit 53 home runs, had an OCSlg of around .815. Yes, when Cust made contact, he hit the ball harder than A-Rod. He also had the single highest home run to fly ball ratio of any hitter in major league baseball who qualified for the batting title this season. Jack Cust's 2007 was truly historic.

A couple of underappreciated aspects about him have kind of escaped notice amid all the hoopla about his K's and homers. First is that he hits a lot of line drives. When you run like Jack Cust, you don't post a BABIP of .360 without hitting a lot of liners. Even when he puts the ball in play, it's pretty infrequent that the defense actually gets to it. Correlary to this (because he doesn't ground out a lot) is the fact that he really doesn't hit into a lot of double plays. Crosby grounded into 11; Cust, in significantly more at-bats, hit into 6.

Also, he doesn't pop up. Like, ever. Even before this season, he had 134 at-bats and had popped up exactly once. This season he basically maintained that by popping up three times in almost 400 at-bats. (Compare this to 6 sacrifice flies. A sac fly, unlike a pop-up, REQUIRES a runner on third base to get scored.)

We have to expect some of these features to regress toward the mean, just because they're SO exceptional as to be almost unprecedented. Next year, he'll probably hit a few less liners, ground into a few more DPs, and strike out a bit less frequently. It's sure fun to watch, though. Cust is a unique baseball player in many ways, and that's worth something.

Mark Ellis

LD 18.0%
GB 31.6%
OFB 41.7%
IFB 8.7%

HR/FB 7.8%
BABIP .302
OCSlg .526

In many ways, Mark Ellis was the epitome of a league-average hitter last year. (Not a league-average PLAYER, mind you. His stellar defense took him way over that mark.) The only difference? He hit a few less grounders, a few more popups, and a few less liners than the average batter. As a consequence, I don't actually have a lot to say here.

One thing I do notice is that he's totally changed his hitter profile from 2005, when he was primarily a ground-ball hitter. His line drives have dropped a bit, but more significantly his fly balls have gone way up. I guess it worked for him last year, but I have a feeling that if he could change his swing back to that of "2005 Ellis," he might come closer to his hitting stats of that season (when he was the team's best batsman). He's not getting a lot of homers per fly ball, so hitting a lot of them is not profiting him much.

The comparison with Crosby points up the limitations of this analysis. It's clear that some aspect of hitting performance isn't captured in batted ball stats. Crosby had a higher HR/FB ratio, more liners, more grounders and fewer flies than Ellis this year. Those would normally signal better BABIP, yet Crosby's was 50 points worse than Ellis's. This seemingly baffling discrepancy can only be explained by QUALITY of flies and grounders, which can't be quantified in sheer numbers.

Jack Hannahan

LD 23.4% 24.4%
GB 37.4% 44.9%
OFB 36.5% 26.9%
IFB 2.8% 3.6%

HR/FB 7.1% 19.3
BABIP .363 .372
OCSlg .580 .655

Minor league stats are in italics.

Jack Cust and Jack Hannahan are opposite sides of the same coin in many a way. Cust was the wunderkind, rushed to the majors and then deemed a failure as a consequence of a tiny sample size. Hannahan was the opposite, a guy who toiled in near-obscurity for years hoping to finally make the majors.

We can compare their batting styles, as well. Cust is all about the power swing; Hannahan is all about control. Cust mugs balls; Hannahan (if his minor league numbers are to be believed) knocks them through a hole. And yet they have some similarities-- both of them were extremely productive when they made contact last season, posting BABIPs of over .360. Hannahan didn't have the same success as Cust with fly balls in the majors (and, really, who did?) but he certainly found his power stroke in the minors, leading me to think he's got 10-15 jacks in him over a full season. Hannahan doesn't hit fly balls very often, so he's never going to threaten to lead the team in homers-- but when he does hit them, he tends to get results.

Hannahan struck me last season as a very smart hitter; I think his knowledge of the strike zone is about as good as any player in baseball. When he looks disgusted with the umpire over a strike call, it was a ball-- you can take it to the bank. I have no doubt that he knows what kinds of batted balls he's most successful at hitting, and uses that info to shape his approach and maximize his results. He's not blessed with a ton of natural talent, but he projects as an above-average hitter at third base next season.

Dan Johnson

LD 18.1%
GB 43.1%
OFB 35.0%
IFB 3.8%

HR/FB 13.5%
BABIP .249
OCSlg .516

Dan Johnson... ouch. Look at that BABIP. It's enough to make you want to cover your eyes when DJ actually makes contact with the ball. Good things are not, by and large, going to come from it.

Unlike Crosby, Johnson's struggles with BABIP aren't much of a surprise. He's a dead pull hitter, which allows teams to shift the defense and field far more balls than "normal" against him. He's left-handed, so when he pulls the ball it goes to the right side of the infield-- making it much easier for the defense to throw him out. And he runs like a sloth with congestive heart failure.

It would be unrealistic, at this point, to expect an improvement from DJ in these essential characteristics. He'll never hit for a high average because of the low BABIP, he'll never have dominant power, and he'll never play a skill position. If you need a decent bat at first base, he's a frustrating but reasonable option. Certainly there are (Sabean, are you listening here? Sabean? Brian?) teams which are desperately in need of some walks and home runs, so he ought to be able to find a niche. Unfortunately, that's what DJ is-- a niche talent.

Mark Kotsay

LD 14.6% (!)
GB 44.9%
OFB 38.4%
IFB 2.1%

HR/FB 1.3%
BABIP .232
OCSlg .328

Zounds.

It's really impossible to overstate how bad Kotsay was in 2007. His BABIP would have been the worst in the league if he had qualified; his OCSlg was worse than Nick Punto's. Only Gary Matthews, Ray Durham and Torii Hunter (how on God's green earth did he hit .287 last year?) had lower line drive percentages.

Kotsay's career numbers paint a clear picture of a player in decline. His line drive graph looks like Niagara Falls-- hovering around 25% for most of his career, then dropping to ~18% last year and 14.6% this year. Likewise with his home run rate, which has sagged badly for two seasons in a row.

Quite frankly, I see no reason for optimism in Kotsay's case. He's well beyond the wrong side of 30 and has a bad back. His power seems to be completely gone, and his ability to make good contact is highly questionable at this point, to say the least. He needs to be on a short leash. If his performance in Spring Training is not up to par, the team should release him and allow younger players to compete for the job.

That's all for today. In the final installment, I'll finish up the player profiles and hand out the End of Season Batted Ball Awards. (And/or lashes with a wet noodle, since I'll be noting the LVPs as well as the MVPs...)