FanPost

Revisiting Bill Hall

There are a few items that I would like to look at today, challenging conventional Bill Hall wisdom.

1) Bill is trying too much to hit the opposite way.

Billy has always pulled ground balls to left and has been a spray fly ball hitter.  That is also the case this year.  His hitting chart shows that his past hitting patterns are still in effect

2) Bill is not walking as much.  

This is true.  Though if he were to walk at last year's rate he would only have 4 more walks and his OBP would be only about .010 points higher.

In fact, though his walks ans K's are down, his BB/K% is still a bit below average and largely consistent as seen here

3)  Bill is grounding out more. This is very true, and this is probably affecting his slugging because his HR/FB rate has also dropped.

You can see that his FB% is down to 41% from last year's 48%.  His HR's per FB is down from 19.4% to 10.9%.  It is this combination of things that is killing his slugging percentage, and to a lesser extent his OBP.

134 balls in play.
55 fly balls
6 HR

Using last years percentages he would have
134 balls in play
64 fly balls
12 HR

If Hall had the same FB% and same HR/FB% as last year his SLG% would be at about .560, and his OPS would be about .900.

4)  Hall was due to regress a bit.

Sadly this also appears to be true.

Last year Hall hit .270/35HR/85RBI/.899OPS

Projected Bill James .268/24HR/71RB/.815OPS
Projected CHONE .265/26HR/86RBI/.820OPS
Projected Marcel .276/23HR/73RBI/.836OPS
Projected ZiPS  .268/24HR/72RBI/.830OPS

On pace 2007  .256/20HR/67RBI/.743OPS

Here is my guess.  And its only a guess.  The smart guys that project this stuff thought that the HR's were an aberration.  The HR/FB% of 19.4% put him in company with some heavy hitters.

He was projected to keep the rest of his numbers constant (adjusted for having about 10 fewer home runs), and even have fewer walks and strikeouts.  So basically he is just a little worse than projected by the experts.