BaseballHappenings.com

I have read a few good articles articles lately about contact rate which is calculated as (AB-K)/AB) . As you improve the more times the ball hits the bat, the better the chances are your batting average improves:

take the example of a hitter whose real skill is to hit home runs 8% of the time he puts the ball in play. If his pure power skills stays intact but his contact rate improves from 70% to 80% from season to season, over a 550 at bat season he suddenly goes from being a 30 home run type to being a 35 home run player, even without an improvement in his rate of home runs per ball in play.

The contact rate sure seems like a distant cousin to BABIP (Batting Averge Balls in Play) or BIPA as ESPN calls it:

This is a measure of the number of batted balls that safely fall in for a hit (not including home runs) calculated as (H – HR) / (AB – HR – SO + SF).

Both of these are rate stats as opposed to counting stats. Where as BABIP depends on some luck, contact rate seems seems like a better indication of the batters abilities.

Here I provide you with BABIP (in order of increasing luck), and showing the contact rate as a percentage alongside :

mysql> select ((ab-so)/ab)*100 as contactrate,truncate((((h-hr)/(ab-hr-so+sf)*10
00)),0) as babip from Batting,Master where yearId = ’2007′ and Master.playerid =
Batting.playerid and ab >300 order by babip