Often, we hear players who are having trouble at the plate say something to the effect of, "I can't catch a break, every ball I hit hard is right to someone." With the exception of Wee Willie Keeler, probably every batter has had a stretch of bad luck such as this at one time or another.
In 2005, JC Bradbury, an economist, Braves fan, and the man behind Sabernomics, introduced a study and statistical measure called PrOPS. PrOPS stands for predicted OPS, and Bradbury attempted to create a way to determine just which players were the victims of bad luck and which players had come down with a touch of Midas.
The system takes a player's walk rates, homerun rates, line drive rates, groundball to flyball ratios, and strikeout rates, percolates and filters the numbers (also known by people who like math as linear regression) and determines what the player's OPS would be if his luck was completely even.
The Hardball Times began publishing the data, and recently, the numbers for 2006 have become available. I surfed on over, and sorted the players by "OPS-PrOPS", in other words, who is luckiest? It seems as if Alex Rios, Gary Matthews Jr. [the "Corporal"?], and Mike Lowell are getting away with things that few other players are not.
Interestingly, of the fifty players who are overperforming the most in baseball, not a single one is on the Philadelphia Phillies. On the other hand, if one sorts the database in the opposite direction, asking who are the unluckiest 50 players, several Phillies appear:
Rank Player PrOPS OPS Diff 41 Bobby Abreu 1.059 .977 -0.082
28 Pat Burrell 1.031 .938 -0.093
44 Jimmy Rollins .770 .691 -0.079
As a matter of fact, looking at the entire Phillies team, only David Dellucci and Shane Victorino are greatly outpacing their predicted performance, and most players have a negative PrOPS-OPS.
The good news is that as a season goes on and a player has more and more plate appearances, his luck tends to even out. Therefore, at some point, we should expect the Phillies luck to change, and the damn dam holding the team's runs back should burst.
Hopefully yesterday's 10-5 win over the Red Sox was the breaking point.
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Scary
Two other players who rank in the fifty unluckiest players are Jim Thome and Albert Pujols. Yes, they could be even better.
Rank Player PrOPS OPS Diff 18 Jim Thome 1.224 1.101 -0.123
25 Albert Pujols 1.370 1.265 -0.105
