Lee, Ramirez among baseball’s “unluckiest hitters”
In a Monday column, ESPN’s Christopher Harris identifies baseball’s most star-crossed batters, based on the discrepancy between their 2010 Batting Average on Balls in Play (BABIP) and their career marks. (The overall Major League average for BABIP is generally around .300).
Aramis Ramirez is the game’s second unluckiest hitter by Harris’s reckoning, with a .183 BABIP this year compared to a .288 career mark, i.e., 105 points below par. Only the Pirates Akinori Iwamura, who is 144 points shy of his .344 career BABIP, has had less good fortune in having his batted balls result in hits.
In the same list, the Cubs’ Derrek Lee turns up 8th, with his .250 BABIP falling 71 points short of Lee’s career standard of .321.
Ramirez and Lee show up in one other spot in Harris’s column: they’re among the ten hitters whose HR rates, as a percentage of fly balls hit, have fallen off the most compared to their career HR/FB rates.
Ramirez is the 6th on that list, with just 5.6% of his fly balls this year resulting in HRs vs. a career figure of 13.4% (–7.8%). Lee is 9th on the same list, with 9.3% this year vs. a career figure of 16.7% (-7.4%).
That’s a lot of “bad luck” for two teammates in one season, which could lead one to believe that a turnaround is inevitable. Of course, that assumes both players continue to play. Ramirez, who rested Sunday in Texas after striking out four times Saturday night, has been plagued by a painful bone bruise on his left hand.
An MRI and x-rays have indicated there is no fracture in the hand and Cubs manager Lou Piniella says the idea of relegating his regular third baseman to the Disabled List has “never been brought up.”
