Who Were the Luckiest and Unluckiest MLB Hitters in May?
With Memorial Day officially in the rearview mirror and the calendar telling us it's June, we are forced to actually consider certain trends as more legitimate instead of dismissing them because of a small sample size. Sure, there are four more months remaining in the 2017 MLB regular season, but two months of data can tell us who is having a good year and who isn't.
As sample sizes start to stabilize (or get closer to stabilizing), we want to figure out which hitters experienced more bad luck than the average, and who ended up being rather fortunate over the past month.
When watching a ballgame, the same traditional stats consistently flash on the screen for hitters -- batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, homers and RBI. What that doesn’t tell us, though, is how they're arriving at those numbers.
So, we're going to look at not only the BABIP and hard-hit rate from qualified hitters, but also parts of their batted-ball profile (mainly their line-drive rate, ground-ball rate and fly-ball rate) to find out who's experiencing some good fortune and who is having some tough luck compared to the league average in these categories.
