All the stats are courtesy of Fangraphs, and for those who aren't familiar with it, BABIP stands for Batting Average on Balls In Play and measures the rate a hitter reaches base when he doesn't walk, strike out, hit a home run or get hit by a pitch. An abnormally high BABIP is quite often the result of good luck among other factors and generally means the hitter is due for a downturn in his statistics as his BABIP regresses back towards his normal rate.
Anyway, here it is. Enjoy
For most of this season and last, it's looked as if the illustrious career of Derek Jeter was going to end in a flurry of softly hit groundballs and double-plays (moreso on the the offensive side of things than the defensive side for sure).
There was even a brief period when Jeter hit the disabled list and it seemed like a blessing in disguise (not a very good disguise), as the Yankees promptly went on a 12-3 tear in his absence with Nick Swisher, Brett Gardner and Curtis Granderson sharing duties in the one and two spots of the lineup. For Red Sox fans like myself, it certainly seemed like Number Two couldn't return to that lineup fast enough.
Fast forward a month and suddenly Jeter's looking once more like the guy whose bat once won him five Gold Gloves. So what happened? Anyone can have a quick look at Jeter's August BABIP and see that his mark of .469 is good for 2nd overall in the majors, behind Alex Avila's otherworldly
.512. But is there more to this than batted balls simply just falling in for hits?
Sure, a lot of this resurgence can be put down to luck and there's almost zero chance that Jeter will be able to maintain that BABIP.
However, taking a look at his break down of batted balls, it certainly does seem like Jeter is doing something right. His line drive percentage for August is sitting at an impressive 36.3%, good for third in the majors behind Cliff Pennington and Todd Helton and also Jeter's best ever percentage for a month since the statistic was first introduced. A .469 BABIP is unmaintainable for even the best hitter (Ty Cobb holds the all-time career record of .390 for players with 5000 or more plate appearances) but when you're hitting more than a third of balls on a line, you can expect a lot of hits.
I haven't got access to Jeter's monthly splits when it comes to which part of the field he's been hitting towards but looking at his LD% of 27.4% on balls hit to the opposite field, I would hazard a guess that he's been hitting a lot more balls the other way this month. Jeter's wOBA is at least 41 points higher on balls hit to right field than those to left, which coupled with his recent spike in offensive statistics, suggests that he's recently changed his hitting approach and is staying on the ball longer and poking it into right field, rather than trying to pull it to left.
It's a well known fact that as players not named Barry Bonds get older, their bat speed slows. So it would make perfect sense for a player of Jeter's age and skill-set to make a concerted effort to try and stay back on the ball and caress it the other way or back up the middle, rather than try and get out in front of it. As I said earlier, Jeter's .469 BABIP this month is not going to last, and you've got to think his career high (at least since 2002) LD% for this month won't either. However, at least for the moment, as long as Jetes keeps pushing that ball back the way it came, it looks like he's figured out a way to turn life's first real batch of lemons (life doesn't have a long history of giving Derek Jeter lemons) into lemonade.
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