Which White Sox players had luck on their side in 2017?

The concept of BABIP (Batting Average on Balls in Play) has established a foothold in common baseball discussion as a rough proxy for the amount of “luck” inherent in a hitter or pitcher’s results during the course of a season. Voros McCracken (of Moneyball fame) first theorized that a pitcher doesn’t have all that much control over what happens once a ball is put into play and that the percentage of balls in play that fell for hits didn’t correlate much from year to year for a particular pitcher. There’s similar year-to-year variance for hitters that can be mostly explained by luck. Hence, many will point to a pitcher who’s experiencing a season with a higher BABIP-against and say that this pitcher has been unlucky. Similarly, when someone like Avisail Garcia posts a BABIP of around .392 (far in excess of his career average of .340), the quick reaction is that Garcia has had a fairly lucky year.

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