Effectively Wild Episode 2305: How Low Can it Go?

Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast

Ben Lindbergh, Meg Rowley

Sports, Baseball

4.8 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 5 April 2025

⏱️ 94 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In a grab-bag episode, Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the low league BABIP early in the season, the most interesting standings developments so far (with emphases on the Dodgers, Padres, Braves, and AL Central), Atlanta re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-acquiring Jesse Chavez, early attendance issues for the A’s, (team-friendly?) extensions for Jackson Merrill, Kristian Campbell, and Ketel […]

Transcript

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0:00.0	A baseball podcast,
0:04.6	Analytics and stats with Ben and Meg from Fangraphs.
0:12.5	Effectively now.
0:17.4	Effective in life.
0:19.6	Effective in life.
0:30.6	Effective in life. Hello and welcome Hello and welcome to Episode 5 of Effectively Wild
0:34.7	A Baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters.
0:39.1	I am Ben Lindberg of the Ringer, joined by Meg Rowley of FanGraphs.
0:43.5	Hello, Meg.
0:44.2	Hello.
0:45.1	I have a grab bag of topics for us today, a little Friday potpoury, and I'll start here.
0:52.0	Do you think this is cause for concern? The league-wide BABIP, batting average on balls and play, is currently through Thursday's games, 273.
1:05.0	Oh. That is a low number, Meg, 273. Now, I went back and looked at every season since 2002, because
1:14.4	Fangraphs makes it easy to go day by day since 2002. And I looked for every season,
1:21.2	the equivalent number of games. So we've had 100 games, 200 team games. And so I looked through the date that was closest to that number of team games in each season,
1:33.6	dating back to 2002.
1:35.1	And this is the lowest babbit easily over that span.
1:39.3	The average has been 290.
1:42.8	There have been some low years before. Last year was 294 through roughly this
1:48.8	same point. So that was more than 20 points higher. In 2020, it was 279. And I wrote an article
1:58.2	saying, where did all the hits go? And I think the answer was probably just it was 2020.
2:03.2	So there was all sorts of stuff going on and things normalized a bit after that.
	...

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