I took a look at every player from 2008-2015 who had a season with a BABIP above .370 to see if there was any trends that I could identify to figure out what to make of Dee Gordon's seemingly bizarre 2015 season and see if we can figure out whether those trends tell us what we can expect from him in 2016. I ended up with 34 player-seasons to analyze.

For starters, here's the data.

Part 1: General conclusions about players in high BABIP seasons

1) They tend to hit the ball harder than the average major leaguer, with a couple notable exceptions that we'll discuss later. Both in terms of batted ball and ISO, these are generally players who drive the ball to the deep parts of the park. This logically makes sense. Per Fangraphs, a line drive is about 3 times as likely to fall in for a hit than a ground ball or fly ball so it is not surprising that most players who have a high BABIP are doing so by hitting lots of line drives and enjoying both the BABIP and ISO boost that comes with hitting line drives.

2) They all regress in BABIP. Full stop. Out of the 26 player-seasons from 2008-2014 that we have next season data for, every single player who posted a BABIP above .370 regressed in BABIP the following season with a mean regression of 42.7 points of BABIP. Extremely high BABIPs do not appear to be sustainable, even for elite hitters.

3) They tend to have better than average peripherals, but with a lot of variation. On average they tend to walk slightly more and strike out slightly less than the average major leaguer, but the wide spread of the data makes me skeptical that K/BB peripherals play much of a role in high BABIP seasons.

4) They don't seem to swing more or less than their peers, or make more or less contact when they swing with a couple notable exceptions. This is a place where the data didn't back up my preconceived hypothesis prior to putting this data together. Other than a few outliers that I'll discuss later, the overall data set for Swing%, O-Contact%, Z-Contact%, and Contact% all fell very close to MLB norms. There doesn't seem to be an easily identifiable plate approach that sets these players apart from those who don't have the same BABIP success.

Part 2: But what about the Dee?

Dee Gordon's 2015 stats are an outlier in almost every category compared to other players who have posted BABIPs above .370 over the last 8 seasons. His success seems to defy everything that we know about BABIP. He doesn't hit the ball hard or drive it to the deep parts of the ballpark, and he barely ever takes a walk. He has another thing that sets him apart from other high BABIP hitters: he hits almost everything he swings at, including making contact with an absurd 93.7% of pitches in the zone that he swings at and 88% of all pitches that he swings at (both >2 standard deviations from other high BABIP-season hitters). Gordon is doing something very different than almost everyone else on the list. The word almost is the key there.

Part 3: The Ichiro comp

If we look at the raw data we see that Dee Gordon's 2015 stands apart as an outlier compared to other >.370 BABIP seasons in the last 8 years. We also see that it isn't the only outlier. Ichiro's 2009 season should also be jumping out at you. Like Dee Gordon in 2015, Ichiro in 2009 hit for relatively little power, hit a lot of ground balls and not a lot of line drives, swung at an average number of pitches, but made an elite level of contact with the pitches that he swung at. It's hard to tell what to make of this comp. Dee Gordon comes to the Marlins and joins Ichiro on the same team, and then comes out of Spring Training to post a season which looks very suspiciously like an Ichiro season. Is this a coincidence or has Dee Gordon truly made an adjustment (presumably with coaching by Ichiro) that has allowed him to recreate Ichiro's nontraditional but highly successful approach? I'm not sure how much we'll know until we see Dee Gordon in 2016.

Part 4: The takeaways

1) Dee Gordon will regress some in BABIP in 2016, because anyone who posts a .383 BABIP is going to regress. Even if we say Gordon is the next Ichiro he's still going to regress. Ichiro is a career .340 BABIP hitter who never posted back to back seasons of >.360 BABIP. No matter how elite a hitter is, .383 is unsustainable.

2) Even with regression, Dee Gordon's new approach might be the real deal and his 2015 season might not be as much of a career outlier as many want to think it is. He doesn't have as much pop as Ichiro, walks less, and strikes out more, which puts his offensive floor and ceiling lower regardless of whether he's able to recreate Ichiro's great batting average. Still, in combination with his more refined defense which has turned him into a plus defender at 2B as well as his ability to swipe 50 bags per year Dee Gordon can be a very productive baseball player if he can continue to hit for average despite his lack of power and unwillingness to work a walk.

3) Teams around the league are going to change their scouting report on Dee Gordon drastically in 2016, and he could be in for a tough season if he can't make the adjustment. The book is out on him now: if he swings at a ball he almost always makes contact, he draws almost no walks, and while he won't punish your mistakes with the long ball he will put any mistake pitch in play. My guess is that he's going to be fed a steady diet of junk pitches outside the zone to start off 2016 to see if he can make the adjustment to draw more walks. There's not a lot of reasons to throw strikes to a guy who puts 93.7% of the balls in the strike zone that he swings at in play.