Give me a fucking break Raj! Are you for real?!?!?!?!?!?
So, since the major league average LOB% is about 72%, anyone above or below it is lucky or unlucky? Really?
Did it ever occur to you that they were above that threshold because they pitch well with runners on base? Mariano Rivera’s LOB% is 90%. I’d be willing to bet that you will NOT find players more than one or two standard deviations from 72% who are not also really good players. If you consistently found guys like Zito or Billingsley or Randy Wolf and that sort of player more than one standard deviation from the norm I would say that yes, LOB rate is a measure of luck.
But the fact that really good pitchers tend to be the ones who are the statistical anomalies tells me that there is more than just luck involved.
BABIP is a little based on luck, but it too is a measure of a pitcher’s skill more than anything else. The fact is that BABIP does not take into account how hard a ball is hit. A poor pitcher gives up more hard-hit balls than a good one does. So when a hard-hit grounder finds a hole, on paper it looks like luck, especially when another grounder finds a glove. BABIP doesn’t take into account that a hard-hit ball doesn’t give an infielder as much time to get to it.
Hard-hit balls that an infielder doesn’t handle are going to be scored a hit more than an error, and certainly more often than a routine ball that isn’t fielded cleanly. So when a hard-hit grounder is bobbled and then the throw is a half-step late, that too looks like luck to a sabermetrician.
But it isn’t luck at all. Unless we are to start believing that how hard a hitter hits the ball is also luck. If that were the case then you could argue that the entire game is pure luck. But the reality is that the ONE THING a pitcher can control pretty well is where the ball is thrown and, as a result, how hard the ball is hit.