Written by Greg Fertel | 23 July 2009

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On June 18^th, I posted about my puzzlement over Austin Jackson's absurdly high batting average on balls in play. Since then, there has been much debate over what to make of Austin Jackson's season to date. At the time, I concluded that, "there is no possible way he can keep getting this lucky."

Since that day, Jackson has posted a below average line of .247/.311/.402. His BABIP over this span has been .280, down quite a bit from the .476 it was on June 18th. His overall line is still an impressive .316/.384/.442 line, but it is still very much based on his still unsustainable .416 BABIP.

I wrote that I thought that Jackson's true talent level this season would have him pinned at a .268/.347/.380 line, and received some gripes about that in the comments. Since then, though, he has performed worse than that. Over this time, his BB% and K% stayed basically the same. The only difference between what he has done over the past month is that he has gotten a bit unlucky instead of ridiculously lucky.

While I'm not happy to see his numbers dip, I was just hoping to show you that high BABIPs like Jackson's will always regress to the mean, and it shouldn't surprise you when they do.

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