Ah, the dog days of August are officially upon us. And now that the non-waiver trade deadline is in the rearview mirror, we can truly focus on teams who are going all in for a chance at reaching October this season. A new month brings a clean slate for everyone, but it's always important to take a quick look back on the month that was to see who performed well and who didn't.
However, it's even more important to see how players arrived at the numbers they eventually produced.
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.