The All-Unlucky Team
	written by: Sean Salsbery 06/27/2008

For my first set of articles here at Fantasy Phenoms, I’m going to assemble a team of the most unlucky players in baseball so far this year. We’re almost exactly at the season’s halfway point, and with the All-Star Game fast approaching, I thought it would be fun to look at the All-Stars of unluckiness.

Today we’ll look at the lineup. I’m evaluating these hitters based on Line Drive Percentage and Contact Rate, as those two indicators go a long way in telling us where a hitter’s Batting Average should be. The BABIP is where the luck comes in.

These are players that you should be targeting in trade, or showing patience with if you own them no matter how close it is to running out. Each one is a full-time player with a solid hold on a lineup spot, they’re each underperforming the hopes managers had for them when the year started. Given equal production, these guys WILL outperform their numbers to this point over the rest of the season.

*Numbers are accurate through Thursday, June 26th

Typically, a line drive should fall in for a hit somewhere around 75% of the time, while ground balls and fly balls do so at rates of 25% and 22%, respectively. Knowing a player’s ball-in-play percentages, along with his contact rate and HR/F, allows us to calculate what a player’s batting average should be, if luck were removed. It’s a statistic I call Adjusted Average (AdAVG), and it’s the number you see at the end of the table above.

Looking at these numbers raises some interesting points. While Johjima, Cano, Beltre, and Byrnes are having awful seasons so far, we can see that they’d all be hitting within expectations if it weren’t for that extra helping of bad luck. They’re all decent buy-low opportunities, as each has a solid hold on a job with their respective clubs. Byrnes in particular could be a great low-risk/high-reward buy, as he should likely come cheap as a seemingly flopped late-bloomer. He also says he’s ready to run again, after being hampered by leg injuries in the early season. Melky’s doubled his HR/F this season, and his average really shouldn’t be any lower than it has been in the past. He’s developing into a pretty good hitter, and at 23 (and on the Yankees) could turn into a very solid fantasy player.

The second group of interest is the aging vets. Helton and Kent are showing that reports of their demises have been greatly exaggerated. Both are clearly in their decline years, but healthy LD rates show that they can still hit the ball hard. Kent’s hitting the ball on the ground more than in recent years, but his HR/F has stayed remarkably steady. Most interesting is he’s going the opposite route of most hitters as they age--he’s striking out and walking less often than he did earlier in his career. He’s an amazing hitter, and the fact that he’s still hitting in the middle of the Dodgers’ order means the second baseman could be a steal in the second half. Helton is losing power all around and making less contact, but he’s still a better hitter than his stats are showing. He should still be a solid producer in three categories.

The final two players may be the most surprising. Lee and Rollins are both having very good fantasy seasons, but they should be having great fantasy seasons. Rollins is hitting out of his mind. He’s improved his contact rate and plate discipline over last year’s career season, yet is retaining all the skills he had last year at the same time. He’s not going to hit 30 homeruns again (his high FB% last year looks a little fluky), but how does a .320/130/25/85/40 shortstop sound? The crazy-high LD% won’t stick, but Rollins’ .270-ish AVG is an illusion. Lee’s never put up good BABIP numbers, but he’s increased his LD% and HR/F this year, and should be right there at his typical .300 AVG. It’s too bad more balls didn’t drop for him in the first half, because he should have racked up even more RBIs batting behind Lance Berkman.

Next week, we’ll see what pitchers make this year’s All-Unlucky Team. See you then.

Sean Salsbery has been a fantasy nut since the halcyon mid-90’s days of AOL’s Grandstand Fantasy Baseball. He can be found as a regular contributor at http://crookedpitch.com/ .