Pinch Hit: Concerned About Hinske?

Concerned About Hinske? (By Leigh Sprague)

I am a regular poster on a fantasy baseball website, and recently came across the following response to a post in which I recommended to a fellow fantasy owner that he pick up Eric Hinske off of the waiver wire:

I laugh everytime I see someone recommending Hinske. I dropped him a month ago and I should have done it even earlier. He is sooo over-rated. If your league gives a lot of points for 3B that consistently hit .240 with an occasional HR - then he is your man. If not, I think you can do much better than Hinske.

Now, I tend to get a little bit defensive when a fellow message board poster laughs at my player recommendations, especially one who uses the 12 year-old girl spelling of the word “so”.

So naturally, I decided to look for some evidence to back up my recommendation, lest the readers of the post think that the picture of Rance Mulliniks on my avatar somehow constitutes bias.

My conclusions below are based on a couple of assertions: firstly, flyball hitters tend to hit more homeruns that groundball hitters. This is an accepted and perfectly reasonable assertion, because groundballs cannot clear the fence. Secondly, a decrease in homerun rate can sometimes be dismissed as a minor irregularity in a player’s career path if that player experiences, at the same time, an increase in the rate at which he hits doubles.

To date in 2003, Hinske has a groundball/flyball ratio of 0.95 (endnote 1). This is low, and thus indicates that Hinske hits a disproportionately high number of flyballs.

There are twenty Major Leaguers who, in 2003, have at least 345 plate appearances and a groundball/flyball ratio between 0.90 and 0.99. Of those twenty hitters, Hinske has the lowest rate of homeruns per double.