Sometime over this weekend, while nursing a sore ankle, I'm guessing that Dexter Fowler joined the millions who have made The Avengers the one of the top box office hits in history, and took some inspiration from the cast of super-heros featured.. Either that or the "treatment" for his ankle involved new super-sceince that made him into the super-hero that we saw in two games on Sunday. OK so maybe not, but at least I can dream. In reality, neither probably happened, so what did we see on the holiday double header?

Since the beginning of May, Fowler has benefitted from a .400 BABIP which has helped him to a very nice triple slash line of .327/.444/.673. While I'd agree that his BABIP from May is unsustainable over the course of the season, I'd argue that is was to be expected at some point. During his April slump, I had advocated patience with him because his batted ball profile, things like LD% GB/FB and HR/FB%, indicated that his BABIP should be much higher as well as a career BABIP to back it up.

It is also important to realize that in order for an average stat like BABIP or even simpler things like OBP to regress back to an expected level it requires a period of time when the player performs above the expected average. A .269 BABIP would never reach his career mark of .340 simply by hitting at a .340 level for the rest of the season. Over enough at bats it might get close, but it is generally not how you see regression take place. To help illustrate this point, let me use an overused statistical example, the coin flip.

If you flip a coin 10,000 times, you will expect in the end to be extremely close to a 50% heads/tails distribution. However, if you looked at the individual flips, you would also see extended stretches where either heads dominate or tails. The same is normally true when looking at baseball statistics, a .300 hitter does not get 3 hits in every 10 at bats. Instead he might have a 1 for 20 stretch then followed by a 8 for 10 streak.

So to get back to my original question, what did we see on Monday? I think we just saw the continued positive regression of Dexter Fowler's BABIP and the resulting production from that. Do I think Fowler is the unstoppable machine that we saw Monday? No. Nor do I think that he is the slave to the BABIP dragon that we saw in April. Rather he is probably closer to the average of those two then either extreme.

Join me after the jump for new tables and some more reading of the future.

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I've decided to continue my research into xBABIP and it's impact on the Colorado Rockies. If you haven't already you'll probably want to read my original article here since I won't go over the individual processes again, but instead focus more on it's implications in today's fanpost.

So first, a little review, from last week's chart shown below. I identified Helton, Fowler, and Scutaro as being the 3 most likely players for positive BABIP regression due to their BABIP being at least .050 below both their expected BABIP(xBABIP) and career BABIP (cBABIP).

Out of those three, we've already seen Scutaro's BABIP regress back to .292 while Helton has shown a slight increase to .217, and Fowler's BABIP has pretty much stayed steady at .269

The most obvious candidates for regression was a bit tougher, but Cuddyer and Colvin probably stuck out the most, even though their BABIP's were backed up with solid xBABIP they were still way higher then their career BABIP. This most likely meant that though their high BABIP was a direct result of good hitting they'd probably just cool off in their hitting approach more then anything. Cuddyer has regressed a bit to a still solid clip of .349 while Colvin decided to bribe the BABIP dragon and now has a BABIP of .440!

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So in today's [Thursday's] Rockpile we were discussing the Rockies team BABIP and whether or not the Rockies were being cheated out of hits. Now most commonly it is believed that batters and pitchers BABIP should normalize around .300. However, if you look at the stats of hitters who have a very large sample size of at-bats like Todd Helton, career BABIP of .334 over 8728 PA, you begin to realize that with individual players and teams you can expect a wide range of BABIP.

So the next step becomes how do you know what a player's BABIP should be, obviously how they hit the ball matters, line drives are more likely to be hits then grounders, and grounders are more likely to be hit then flyballs So taking those thoughts and doing a little math you arrive at a simple formula

expected BABIP = .15 * FB% + .24 * GB% + .73 * LD%

which assumes that 15 % of fly balls on average become hits, 24% of ground balls and 73% of line drives.

Now you can go a little bit deeper into xBABIP formula you can find some interesting formulas all of which are more involved taking into account a lot of other factors. The one I used came from slash12 from beyond the boxscore with the original article found here.

xBABIP =0.391597252 + (LD% x 0.287709436 ) + ((GB% - (GB% * IFH%) ) x -0.151969035 ) + ((FB% - (FB% x HR/FB%) - (FB% x IFFB%)) x -0.187532776) + ((IFFB% * FB%) x -0.834512464) + ((IFH% * GB%) x 0.4997192 )

Fangraphs as well as a few other sites I checked out recommended it as accurate as a predictive stat could be. So I went ahead and plugged in the top offensive producers for the Rockies to see how their xBABIP matched up to their actual BABIP. I also wanted to compare this to their career BABIP (cBABIP) with my idea being that players who's current BABIP was below both their cBABIP and xBABIP were due for an upward regression. Also players with BABIP lower then their cBABIP, but close to their xBABIP were not due for a regression but simply had flaws in their hitting approach.

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Let the Row know what your thinking in regards to how this day will turn out.  Project the final score, how individual players will perform, etc.  If you feel like going further, project the season as well, after all it's opening day when everyone is still in the playoff race.  

Personally, 

Rox 6 D-backs 2

Cook 6 IP, 4K, 1BB, 3 H, 1 ER

Helton 2-4, BB, 2B, 2 RBI

Have fun, IT'S OPENING DAY :)

So out of this list of prospects sitting in AAA/AA who do you think will be getting the call to the majors first?  I'm assuming that Morales and Stewart make the team out of Spring training.  So in my opinion I'm looking at are Dexter Fowler, Eric Young Jr., and Jhoulys Chacin as our top 3 in waiting.  Another possible candidate I 'm guessing would be Greg Reynolds.  Also, this is more in regards to who will make it and stick.