Is there a rating or characteristic or a combination of them that you think is indicative of a player who is likely to ground out into a lot of double plays?
I'm seeing a lot lately and it's getting to me. I'm not saying the game is bugged with them. My team is losing a lot lately and I know that's just going to happen sometimes, but it just seems like we're grounding into double play after double play when I just don't think we should.
The first rating that comes to mind is speed. Of course a slow player is bound to ground into more DPs than others, but I don't think that's our only problem if it is one. I usually put a premium on speed, more so than most I'm sure, but while I usually have a faster team, 5 of our 9 typical vRHP lineup have 35/80 or worse speed right now and 2 more have speed in the 40s. Our typical vLHP lineup is a bit better, but not by much. Okay, so that might be a problem. I looked at the league-wide GIDP leaders and the leaders aren't all slow, but most of them are.
Next up I'd say are players who hit weak grounders. Now there's not really a rating that indicates "weak groundball hitter", but the batted ball profile does show either: line drive, normal, groundball, flyball. My guy who has into the most GIDPs is listed as a GB hitter and he only starts vs RHP so he's a bit of a problem, but the vast majority of my players are either listed as normal or line drive hitters. I look at the league-wide GIDP leaders and besides my guy, they're all listed as either normal or line drive. Huh. Not what I expected there.
The GB Tendency and FB Tendency characteristics say normal, pull, or spray. And I wonder, would any of them indicate a player who is more likely to GIDPs? I looked at the league-wide GIDP leaders and I don't see a commonality there.
Okay, so groundball hitters are probably bad, but what about the "weak" part? Would a bad BABIP be indicative of a weak hitting player? I again look at the league-wide GIDP leaders and I don't see a commonality there either. Most of them have a BABIP of 50/80 or greater. I'm surprised by this too, but then again, if you have a bad BABIP you're probably not getting a whole lot of PAs.
What about LHB or RHB? Well, I initially thought it might partly be a LHB issue as my typical vRHP lineup has 5 LHBs (and 1 SHB) and my team leader in GIDP is a LHB too, but then I thought that didn't make sense as I remembered a big part of Ichiro's hitting game was because he was a LHB he was closer to 1B. What about the league leaders again? Most are, as expected, RHB, but of course most players are so that's probably not it.
Looking at last year's leaders, I was surprised to see a lot of my roster near the top, but other than speed I didn't see anything common among them. Could it have to do with our coaches? Both our base coaches have average listed for in-game running. Our manager is listed as neutral for both aggressive running and hit and run while our bench coach is above average for both. None of those seem too far out there and I don't control the running while playing out games. EDIT: Could it possibly have to do with me playing out all my games whereas the rest of the games in the league are simmed?
What about IRL? Well I know Pujols is famous for hitting into the most GIDPs of all-time. And after him are Miguel Cabrera and Cal Ripken Jr. They all, of course, also played a lot of games. So what about GIDP/PA? Well of the career GIDP leaders,
here's the GIDP/PA ranking. But I'm not the historical expert that a lot of you are so I ask you, is there anything in common with most of these players? I was surprised to see that I'm not that familiar with a lot of the players in that top 20 (I am with some of course, but not most) so I wonder if MLB has figured it out and weeds that type of player out now, if they don't bring a lot of value some other way that is. Note that none of the first 3 I mentioned are in the top 28 (Pujols is #29).
Is there a rating or characteristic I haven't mentioned that I should look at? How would you rank them? I really thought speed, GB type hitter, and low BABIP would all identify these players, but from what I'm seeing only speed really does. Should more?