Bradley's BAbip

Probably, but he’s moving to the lesser league and playing for a better offense. Like the poster above said, even if he loses some thirty points of his wOBA last year, he still would be a great player. The big issue with him is health, not his BABIP.
Also, THT had Bradley as the sixth luckiest hitter in baseball, as measured by the discrepancy between his BABIP and xBABIP. Interestingly, the luckiest in the league(by far) was Joey Gathright. Aaron Miles, Ryan Theriot, Geovany Soto and Reed Johnson all cracked the top twelve. All told, the Cubs made up half of the top twelve list of luckiest in the league.

Is that without luck, Milton is still an .800+ OPS guy instead of a .900+ or even 1.000 OPS guy. That means he is still valuable but not at an elite level. His BAbip indicates that his average was inflated by about .070 points, which means that his slugging was inflated at least by that much too (or more, if his lucky hits turned out to be more than singles). Substract that .140 from his OPS and he doesn’t look nearly as good.

While the argument is true that he is moving to a lesser league, he is also moving out of Texas which probably has one of the most hitting friedly stadiums in the league, and his splits certainly showed difference.

I’m not saying that he can’t be elite, just that taking into account BAbip his numbers look way different. Last year everyone was pointing out that Theriot’s numbers in the beginning were not real because he had a .390 BAbip or so, but I find it strange that it has hardly been mentioned with Bradley. A .388 or even .396 BAbip suggest a wide margin of regression anyway you look at it.

He struggled his first few years in the league, those being his years in Montreal and his early years in Cleveland. In 2003 something clicked, and he posted a .923 OPS. After leaving Cleveland, he spent his next four seasons on offensively challenged teams in horrible hitter’s ballparks, all the while posting OPS’s of .786,.835,.818 and .947. I don’t need to point out how good he was in Texas last year.
Wrigley Field is a pretty decent hitters ballpark, (it actually graded out as a better hitters park than the Ballpark in Arlington) especially for a guy that can take advantage of winds blowing in either direction. I don’t think it’s a stretch to consider him an elite hitting outfielder, with the caveat that he’ll miss a bunch of games. For what it’s worth, PECOTA has some seriously lofty expectations for him, as it has him posting a line of .294/.402/.525 next year, over 504 AB’s.

It has been assumed that Bradley if healthy would be elite or great, but the numbers (any numbers) just don’t support that. I know others have already mentioned this here.

I figure the league influence will be lessened because he is also moving out of the stadium in Texas, which I believe is even more favorables than Wrigley.

So I don’t know where those projections come from because Bradley has really never been that high on OPS and his predicted BAbip is around .334. Perhaps league factors are the main reason, although my thinking was that moving out of the stadium in Texas would cancel that out.

Bradley is a very difficult player to project due to all his injuries. These projection systems of course use regression to the mean in their analysis, but with Bradley, it is very difficult to determine where that mean is. With all his injuries, it is hard to tell how much of his production has been hampered by being less than 100. I don’t necessarily disagree with the above projections, since his BAbip is unsustainable, but I think that some of the lower projections above are probably due to his multitude of injuries occurring right as he entered what should have been his prime years. Thus, I think if Bradley can play near 100 outside of his requisite DL trip(s), we’ll be getting a +.900 OPS guy. He has certainly shown the ability to perform at this level both last year and his time in SD in 2007 where his OPS was above 1.000 despite Petco being a pitcher’s park.