What Is BABIP in Softball?

BABIP strips out the two outcomes the defense can't influence — strikeouts and home runs — and asks what happened to everything else. It's a way of separating how well you hit the ball from how lucky you got.

An unusually high BABIP often means good contact, good speed, or a run of balls finding gaps. An unusually low one often means hard-hit balls going straight at fielders. Over a short season, luck dominates; over many games it settles toward your true contact quality.

In slowpitch BABIP is high across the board, because there are no strikeout-inducing pitchers and defenses are typically weaker. It's most useful as a comparison against your own past seasons rather than against a league-wide standard.