322 Feet: Prose from the Petco Porch

Seems like everyone and their mom is talking about Khalil lately and whether it’s a good value proposition to keep him around through the end of his contract. This is especially relevant since the likelihood of him signing an extension is seemingly low and the chatter about him being trade bait seems to get louder daily. Friar Forecast (Greene acres), Ducksnorts (The Khalil Conundrum) and The Sac Bunt (The kase against KT) have chimed in, among others. MB’s piece at Friar Forecast got me thinking about the types of balls Khalil hits and whether that might have something to do with all this.

Let’s first look at Khalil’s line-drive percentages, both in Petco Park and on the road. It’s been said that line-drive percentage can be a decent predictor of average and power. In 2007, Khalil posted a .197 ISO (SLG-AVG) at home; however, in doing so, he hit .215 in the process. On the road, his ISO jumped to .231, while his average jumped to .288; the average is significantly different, but I would argue that the power difference could be nothing more than the elevation change. So, do the line-drive percentages give us any clues as to why Khalil’s splits are so funky? To a point, yes, but I think that this might be a spurious correlation. At home, 15% of Khalil’s hits were line drives; on the road, 24% were liners. At a glance, this would seem to indicate that either the Petco environment or the perception of that in Khalil’s head lead him to get less solid contact at home. However, when we look at the 2006 numbers, it appears that this might not be the answer; his percentages were 22% at home and 24% on the road with similar ancillary splits (.210 AVG/.136 ISO at home, .280/.227 on the road). For reference, the league average line-drive percentage was 19.1% in 2007, while the league hit .271 with a .152 ISO. This probably merits a more in-depth look, but I don’t think there’s much here.

However, this does lead me to believe that another percentage might hold the key to this. When we take Khalil’s line-drive and ground-ball percentages and subtract them from 100%, we get the percentage of balls that Khalil hit in the air. At home in ‘07, this number came out to 48%; in 2006, the number was 49%. On the road, 41% of the balls Khalil hits were in the air.

Now we’re getting somewhere. Though the sample is kind of small, it’s clear that Khalil hits the ball in the air a little more at home than on the road. This leads me to believe that since Khalil hits the ball more in the air at Petco, there’s something either in the environment or in Khalil’s head that makes the ball hang up a little longer in Petco. Maybe it’s the big gaps, maybe it’s the climate, maybe it’s psychological…I’m not going to pretend to have the answer. However, I think this may indicate something about Khalil’s game that is not adaptable to Petco Park. The secondary numbers seem to back up this premonition; his BABIP at home over the last 2 years is .250, while it’s .302 on the road.  Further, those 2 averages over the last 2 years have only varied by 1 point, which indicates that this might not be a fluke. The small sample size makes me a little skeptical, however.

Anybody think there’s anything to this?