If someone were to offer me the chance to guarantee World Series’ victories for the New York Yankees by taking years off my life, I would immediately begin living the healthiest lifestyle known to man, in the hopes that I could extend my life, providing more years with which to trade. I spend more time concerned with the Yankees than any other single topic in my life. I know Robinson Cano’s walk rates going back to his rookie year. I know Babe Ruth’s wins above replacement and weighted on base in the year 1923. I have watched hundreds of games on TV. The ones I couldn’t watch, I followed on ESPN Gamecast or MLB Gameday. When that was impossible, I pored over recaps and box scores until I could retell the game as if I had been there. But the funny thing is that, in 21 years, 3 months and 2 weeks, I had never actually been there.
Huntington, West Virginia has many virtues. Proximity to civilization is not exactly one of them. The closest baseball team is three hours away, but the Reds are in the National League. When I moved to Pittsburgh for college, matters were unimproved, with the Pirates also playing in the NL. For that matter, even in the rare interleague series they might play against the Yankees, I would be home for the summer.
You would think that with all of the family I have living in the New York area, at some point a Yankees game would have happened. Particularly since this is not only a personal obsession. My entire family treats the Yankees like something between a sacred heritage and a second religion. But alas, while my parents have seen Yankee games, and my sisters have seen Yankee games, I never had seen one.
Then, on September 13th, 2010, I got a text message from a friend of mine. “Tell me you can skip all of your classes on Friday,” it read. “I don’t have any classes on Friday,” I responded. Now, my friend James has a lot of crazy ideas. Model rockets on bicycles—that’s his forte. So when he tells you to keep a day open, it could be something as benign as flying kites with LED lights attached to them. Or, it could be a seminal, life changing, mind-blowing event. “Keep it that way,” he said. “I’ll let you know why in a few minutes.”
So I went to my basketball class, my art class and my labor econ class completely oblivious as to the fact that my life had irrevocably changed and I just hadn’t been told yet. Then I got a text relating the details of the plan: James, myself and another friend, Steve, would travel to Washington on Thursday night, stay over at Steve’s house, and then travel to Baltimore on Friday evening to watch the Yankees play the Orioles at Camden Yards.
The text I sent in response was equal parts stupefied and skeptical. I had been waiting for this opportunity for so long that I did not have any reason to believe that it might actually happen. On top of that, James’ plans are often, shall we say, incomplete. “Okay. We have tickets?” I responded.
Of course, such calm, reasonable, pragmatic details were the furthest thing from my mind at that particular moment. I was burning up like a Mac on top of a pillow, my heart was going faster than Mike Portnoy’s double bass pedal, and I was almost afraid to smile, as if smiling would tempt fate. I didn’t tell anyone because I didn’t want to have to deal with the crushing blow of informing them that it had fallen through. So I sleep-walked through Tuesday and much of Wednesday, day-dreaming in a surreal world where I was going to see the New York Yankees play baseball. In person. With my own eyes.
As the confirmations began to come through—yes, there were seats available, yes they were reasonably priced, yes, Steve did need to get home for an evaluation before entering the priesthood—this stupendous other reality began to collide with the world, until finally it was Thursday afternoon, and I had the printed tickets in my hand, staring at them like they were orders to go to the Moon. I had vicariously experienced thousands of Yankee games. But these tickets were as tangible as the fingers grasping them, and they meant it was going to be vicarious no longer.
The car ride to Virginia was mostly uneventful, outside of James gashing his head open, the check engine light coming on, and the Sheetz having no pepperoni rolls. Looking back on it now, it was an atrocious car ride. It is a testament to my state of mind that I was stupidly grinning throughout the entire trip. When we finally arrived at Steve’s house, it was late. But I didn’t sleep. Ambien couldn’t have gotten me to sleep; watching Glenn Beck couldn’t have put me to sleep; reading James Joyce wouldn’t have done it.
That morning, we took Steve to his psychological evaluation, and did some stuff the rest of the day that seems to be fading from memory as I write. This is not inconsequential; Washington D.C. houses the Air and Space Museum, quite possibly my favorite building in the world. To overcome such a memory, the rest of the day had to be quite something.
After waiting for 21 years, 3 months and 2 weeks, I was running out of patience. So, of course, the car ride to Baltimore took three times as long as it should have, due to gridlock and hair-pulling traffic. If there was a theme to this trip, it had to be patience. 21 years of patience. 3 hours of patience. 9 innings of patience.
After the three hours of tortuously slow driving, Steve and I jumped out of the car and walked—okay, we more or less ran—to the stadium while James and his friend Bryan parked the car. I was in a daze as I handed my ticket to the—and then there were people—passing concession stands—weaving in and out of crowds—section 56, section 76, section 83—
Boom. Shock. Awe.
Unwavering, unfaltering, unexplainable awe.
It wasn’t the first time I had come out of the tunnel to see the green grass of a baseball diamond. It wasn’t even the first time I had done so at Camden Yards. But this time, Derek Jeter was perambulating the infield. Curtis Granderson was patrolling the outfield. Alex Rodriguez was making the throw from third to first look like it was no longer than a bowling alley. Brett Gardner was tossing with someone from the bullpen, and Robinson Cano was practicing the double play catch and flick to Mark Teixeira.
Never again could I watch this team on TV, the internet, or on any other device we invent, without knowing that I saw them. I saw Nick Swisher. I saw Jorge Posada. I saw A.J. Burnett. They were real. They weren’t just highly accurate representations created by pixilation on an LCD screen.
Somewhere in all of this Steve and I found our seats, where I was shaking with so much nervous energy I think Steve was worried I might be having an epileptic seizure. A.J. got through a perfect inning before A-Rod came to bat in the second. Pitch one: ball. Pitch two: deposited in the seats. 1-0 Yankees.
Of course I made a lot of noise, but the next thing I did was call my dad. Yankees’ triumphs are meant to be celebrated with as many people as possible. Enjoying a victory without other people around is like being proud that you are the last man on Earth. Sure, you survived, but who cares? That’s right, nobody. They’re all dead.
“When A-Rod breaks the home run record someday, I’ll be able to say I saw one of them,” I said. What my dad said in return is up for debate. It was loud at Camden Yards, shaking from the stentorian collective voice of thousands of Yankee fans (Baltimore should really be appalled that it let Yankee fans outnumber Orioles fans). But it didn’t matter. He was on the phone, my mom was listening somehow, my siblings were all either watching or at least paying attention to the score.
Family being part of the equation is essential. Rooting for a baseball team alone is like trying to get into Heaven alone. You can’t do it. Imagine sitting in a completely empty baseball stadium; forlornness, solitude, other such things come to mind. But sitting in a stadium full of screaming fans, united in their attempt to will a team to victory, is like the angels looking down on the Earth, praying for souls to find their way to the Pearly Gates.
Of course, as the innings crept by, this outcome appeared unlikely. The bats had gone cold, and while A.J. was pitching well, the Orioles pushed three runs across on a couple of solo shots and a hit-by-pitch that got around the base paths. Derek Jeter was freezing while strikes went by, Teixeira was not getting out of the infield…
Top of the ninth. I dare not hope, but of course I was hoping. The stadium seemed lifeless, but then a strange thing happened: Jorge Posada worked a ten pitch at-bat before singling to left center field. Even James, a devout Pirates fan, was rooting for a Yankee rally after this. If it had been a first pitch dribbler through the right side of the infield, I don’t think it would have meant anything. But Jorge had gotten down in the count and fought his way back. This guy was hittable.
And Curtis Granderson hit him, singling to left in between two futile Jeter/Teixeira at bats. And then, with two outs, two on, and the whole stadium standing, Alex Rodriguez came to the plate.
Game 2 of the 2009 American League Divisional Series—during a postseason where the Yankees would eventually win the title—seemed like an important game. The Yankees had not proceeded past the first round for years. They were up in the series but if they lost this one, they would be heading to Minnesota with the Twins having a chance to close out the series at home. They were almost visibly burdened by a decade of lost seasons and missed expectations. And then, all of the sudden, they were losing 3-1 in the ninth, with two outs and nobody on. Mark Teixeira drew a walk, and Alex Rodriguez was at the plate.
A-Rod was purportedly terrible in the postseason—and there was some evidence to support this—being consistently lambasted for his inability to deliver when it “counts.” But as he walked into the batter’s box, I knew he would do one of two things: walk, if they didn’t pitch to him, or hit a home run to tie the game. When the latter happened, I nearly fell over. And I was sitting down. I immediately called my mom, dad, sister, brother, other sister, other brother, and just about anyone else to whom I am slightly related. The Petranys were screaming and hollering and joyfully jumping around the whole night, capped off by Teixeira’s game-winning home-run a few innings later.
The 2009 postseason was like that. Sometimes, when A-Rod came to the plate, or Robertson came into pitch, you knew what they were going to do. You knew a home run, a strikeout, a double down the line or a double play was on its way.
Up to this point, the 2010 season never had one of those moments. There was never a point where the air was tangibly heavy with hope and possibilities. The Yankees have played well. And they have had their walk-offs and their dramatic come from behind wins, and so on. But it was not magical, because they haven’t needed magic. They have been steady, good, professional. But A-Rod has never been the consummate professional.
Crack. I experienced A-Rod’s swing almost out-of-body. I remember it happening but it doesn’t seem like I was the one watching it. As he swung, it occurred to me that he should hit a home run. And then as the ball hung in the air, there was the briefest fraction of a second where tens of thousands of standing fans breathed in, before the ball dropped into the seats and I think I lost an organ or two whilst screaming.
Mariano came in and locked it down; getting to witness Rivera the Great in my first Yankee game was another boon of A-Rod’s majestic blast. And then I sat with James, Steve and James’ friend Bryan, watching forty-five minutes of fireworks, stupidly grinning, yet again. I was imagining watching the recap on ESPN. I was imagining reading the game details on River Avenue Blues. I was hoarse, exhausted, and in actual physical pain due to an aggravation of a surgical wound. And I am not sure if I ever been happier in my life.
None of this matters if my parents and family don’t inculcate in me a righteous appreciation for the game of baseball and for the Yankees. None of it matters if I get to go to a game when I am eleven, enjoying it but not appreciating its grandeur and uniqueness. None of it matters if I lose hope in the traffic on the way there or in the eight innings leading up to the ninth inning. None of it even happens for me if I don’t have a spectacular friend, who not only went out of his way to get me to a Yankees game, but who, in a moment of pure virtue, seemed genuinely—genuinely—happy to see how ecstatic I was as A-Rod’s bomb landed beyond the fence.
Family. Friends. Baseball. The New York Yankees. Moments like this make life worth living. All 21 years, 3 months, and 2 weeks of it.
Friday, September 24, 2010
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Hughsie
http://sports.espn.go.com/new-york/mlb/news/story?id=5546778
Come on, people. Hughsie?!
~The Sports Maunderer~
Come on, people. Hughsie?!
~The Sports Maunderer~
Friday, August 6, 2010
Draw your SABR!
(Editor’s Note: This is a really long post. You should read it in sections. There are pretty obvious points of possible intermission.)
Once upon a time, I asked someone why “Runs Scored” was not a baseball statistic to which anyone paid attention, while runs batted in brought out the googly-eyes. The answer I got was that while getting on base is under the control of a player, whether or not the next guy up knocks them in is out of their control, so runs do not adequately reflect an innate ability to score so much as the luck of who is up after them. While I mostly accepted this explanation—I was nine years old or something, I was not going to nitpick too much—it bothered me. I understood the logic; I just did not understand why it only applied to runs. How were RBIs any different in their relative arbitrariness?
About a decade later, I finally got the answer: they aren’t. They aren’t at all.
To continue with the personal anecdotes (I despise the narcissism inherent in personal anecdotes, but alas, I am not a good enough writer to entirely avoid them), as a nascent teenager, I began to take issue with the phrase that even the best hitters fail seven out of ten times. This phrase is based on the notion that very good hitters have averages in the .300 range, hence they fail to get a hit seven out of ten times. The problem with this is that hits and outs are not the only possible outcomes. Walks are a huge part of the game, and the best hitters have on base percentages in the .400 range, not the .300 range. Hence, the best hitters fail only six out of ten times. Which is barely more than half of the time.
Why do these boring personal histories and seemingly petulant statistical problems matter? Here is why they matter:
The Kansas City Royals currently lead the American League in batting average. They are tenth in the league in runs scored. How to explain this?
Ubaldo Jimenez’s crazy beginning to the year (ERA consistently under 1) masked the fact that he wasn’t even the third best pitcher in the National League. I commented to a friend of mine on Facebook that Jimenez was due for quite the reality check, and, lo and behold, his ERA is now nearly two full runs higher. I don’t mention this to toot my own prognosticative horn; nay, I do it to point out that it was incredibly obvious that Jimenez’s numbers were somewhat fraudulent. Very good pitcher? Of course. In the league of Josh Johnson and Roy Halladay? Definitely not.
As a personal one for Yankee fans: do you remember how for almost the entire last decade, it seemed like every time a pitcher came to the Yankees, no matter how impressive his pedigree, he sucked? And as soon as pitchers left the Yankees, no matter how unimpressive their pedigrees, they suddenly found a fountain of talent they had never known about before? This was not an illusion. This actually happened. And there is a very good reason for it.
Another somewhat personal tidbit for Yankee fans: Francisco Cervelli, he of the backup catching duties, was batting .400 for a surprisingly large portion of the season as he filled in for Jorge Posada. Now, no one in their right mind thought he would keep that pace up, but did they realize just how lucky he was getting, and that he was due for a gigantic regression that has him hitting around the Mendoza line since his early hot streak? I did. Again, not because I’m brilliant (well, maybe I am, but that is beside the point.) I just happen to have the website Fangraphs.com as a favorite on my computer.
Much of baseball is a mystery, obviously. Any game where the best team in the league loses 35-40% of the time is hard to predict. But it becomes much easier to predict, and the game makes much more sense, if you give up on the classic baseball stats which do more to hide the reality of the game than reveal it. And if you replace them with advanced statistics—wOBA, FIP, UZR, WAR—all of the sudden it makes sense why Derek Jeter was one of the best players in the league last year, and Mark Teixeira was simply very good, despite out-homering and out-RBI-ing the Yankee shortstop by a wide, wide margin.
So that is what we are going to do. I am going to run through the most important/easy-to-use advanced stats, what they mean, and some examples to show why they are so important, and so much more valid than traditional stats. I will also run through the traditional stats that are absolutely, utterly, and in every way completely useless—and of course, explain why. Then I will list (if we can even use that word) the rare traditional stats that are not completely useless. Depending on how broad your concept of “traditional” stat is, this could be many, or it could be none. So let us get started.
The Utterly Absurd
Wins. There is no stat—none—more pathetic, more useless, less indicative of a player’s actual value, than the “win.” It means an ounce of honey more than nothing. A pitcher has so little control over this statistic that it is a sad indictment against the collective intelligence of humanity that this statistic has survived this long. Once upon a time, when starting pitchers all threw complete games, the stat still made very little sense, but at least it was somewhat defensible. Now, in the era of specialty bullpens, six inning pitchers, closers, etcetera—it is indefensible. Alfredo Aceves—yeah, the one and only—was 10-1 last year. 10-1. Alfredo Aceves is, at best, a mediocre pitcher, yet he had a record that would make Pedro Martinez circa 1999 jealous. Meanwhile, the Cy Young Award winner in the American League last year—the deserved winner, I might add—won a meager sixteen games. Zach Greinke, a pitcher for the Royals, was head and shoulders above everyone else in the AL, but his wins are paltry because his team stunk. A lot. The inanity of this “statistic” (its hold on that title is about as legitimate as “times the first basemen blows a bubble”) is so overwhelming that whatever paltry writing skills I do possess simply go out the window as I become frustrated writing about it. So let’s just list some adjectives. Insane. Garbage. Ridiculous. Absurd. Counter-productive. Idiotic. Regressive. Neanderthal.
Runs Batted In. This stat is not quite as egregious as the win because while it does not give you any real measure of a player’s worth, it does at least give you an idea of something that happened in the game. You look at a box score and see that someone had two RBIs, and while this tells you nothing about whether he is a particularly good player or not, it does tell you that he actually came up with runners on base and got some sort of hit or something. Not much, but it is something. (Although, it is even really less than it seems, because he could have grounded into two double plays for those two RBIs. You really don’t know.) The numbers 3 and 4 hitters for teams will almost always have the most RBIs completely regardless of how good they actually are. Mark Teixeira, despite his putrid first halves, always ends with decent RBI numbers around the All Star Break, because Derek Jeter, Nick Swisher, et al are on base so often that he could ground out to first (which he does a lot) and still pick up his RBIs. This happens so often in baseball that you would think people would have gotten over their fascination with RBIs, but what can we say. Old habits and all that. (The case in point here is Ryan Howard. He is a decent though not spectacular first basemen, but because Chase Utley and the other Phillies in front of him are always on base, he has had huge RBI totals the last few seasons. This doesn’t make him any better than Adrian Gonzalez, it just means his team is better. But because we want RBIs to mean something for some reason, he just got signed to a mind-boggling five year, 125 million dollar contract. Go figure.)
Not Very Useful But Not Opprobrious
Batting Average. As mentioned previously, the Kansas City Royals lead the league in batting average. Being faithful readers, you are intelligent enough to know that the Royals stink like a flamingo run through a wood chipper. If batting average meant a lot, you would think that this couldn’t happen, eh?
The truth is: batting average is infinitely inferior to another statistic, on base percentage. On base percentage itself is somewhat flawed (we’ll get to the super duper stat that fixes most of these flaws later), but it is quite useable, and more importantly, it is so easy. OBP is not any more difficult to understand than batting average. It is not VORP or xFIP or Bohr’s Law or something. It is the exact same thing as batting average except that it takes into account walks and hit-by-pitches. This is, quite simply, a better statistic than batting average. Extremely rare is the moment when batting average gives a better idea of someone’s skill level than OBP. I’m having difficulty finding a single instance of such a scenario. If one guy hits .280 but has an OBP of .400, while another guy hits .320 but has an OBP of .350, ceteris paribus, the guy with the OBP of .400 is not only better, he is significantly better.
Guys with high OBPs, due to their plate discipline, often have high averages. And guys with high averages often have high OBPs because if pitchers know they can just throw the ball out of the zone and you will chase it, your average likely won’t be very high. But often is not always, and it is plenty common to see guys with low averages and high OBPs (Nick Swisher, for instance) or guys with low OBPs relative to their average (Robinson Cano, for instance).
The most important thing a batter can do is not make an out. There is nothing more important he can do. If no batter on the team makes an out, the team will score tons of runs, obviously. OBP captures exactly how successful a batter is at not making an out. Batting average does not. It is that simple.
Earned Run Average. This is not a useless statistic. It does give you, in some instances, a modicum of an idea of how well a pitcher has performed. But in reality, it does not give you much of one. Reliance on ERA is, in fact, one of the reasons that Yankee pitching staffs of the mid-decade seemed far worse than they actually were. ERA completely discounts a huge aspect of the game: defense.
Once a hitter puts the ball in play, the pitcher has almost nothing to say about whether it is a hit or not. He is entirely reliant on 1) whether the ball stays in the park and 2) if it does, whether the fielders get to it. For the period from around 2002-2008, the Yankees consistently boasted one of, if not the worst, defenses in the league. An argument—a strong argument—can be made that their defense in 2005 was the worst in the history of the game. Their 2005 defense gave up 150 (!) runs more than an average defense that year. 150!!! For perspective, in the past decade, no other defense even gave up 100 more runs than average. 2005 was historically bad, made to seem less so only because the surrounding years involved horrific defense as well.
Of course, none of this shows up in ERA. When Bernie Williams’ corpse fails to reach easy fly after easy fly, they are listed as hits and the hits are turned into “earned” runs (whatever that even means) which compile to make a pitcher’s ERA look very bad. Stick the same pitcher on the 2008 Tampa Bay Rays (they of the defense awesome enough to carry them to a World Series berth) and the same pitcher would look drastically better.
Honorable Mentions
Slugging percentage, i.e. how many bases a hitter gets per at bat, is a pretty useful tool. It gives a very good idea of how much power a particular hitter has. It isn’t foolproof, but a triple slash (batting average/on-base-percentage/slugging percentage) can usually give you a pretty good idea whether a hitter is good or not. For instance, a hitter with a .250/.300/.350 line is bad. Very bad. A hitter with a .250/.350/.550 line is actually pretty decent. A hitter with a .250/.400/.580 line is a monster. Notice how they all had the same batting average. And these aren’t just wacky possibilities I pulled out of a hat. These kinds of batting lines are very common. It’s why the Yankees score more runs—a lot more runs—than the Royals, despite having far inferior batting averages. The fact is that batting average is not important. Getting on base and hitting the ball far are much more important, and these are reflected in OBP and slugging.
Mariano Rivera’s ERA: as we will see in a moment, the more advanced stats almost always underrate Mariano Rivera, for the very simple reason that he often breaks bats more than he misses them. Yet given that he has consistently outperformed his the expectations of advanced stats for over a decade, the large sample size dictates that he simply is better than his FIP (don’t worry, we are getting there….) indicates. So as with everything else, Mariano is simply the ineffable exception.
The Statistics That Do Matter
There are far too many to list them all. Some are also really complicated, and some are too narrowly focused (i.e. groundball versus line drive percentage, etc.) to be of much use on an everyday basis. So I picked my five or six favorites based on their usefulness, ease in understanding them, their broadness, and their awesomeness. I invented that last metric. Let’s go with position players first.
Batting Average on Balls In Play (BABIP). This is an undeniably useful statistic. Basically, it says how often a ball drops in for a hit after the hitter has already put it in play. It turns out that hitters do not have much control over this. We like to think that good hitters “hit them where they ain’t” but in fact, the only way to really guarantee a hit is to knock it entirely out of the park. For the vast majority of times where that doesn’t happen, a player’s BABIP is more dependent on speed than anything else. For instance, Brett Gardner’s BABIP will generally be good, whereas Prince Fielder’s will probably be lower. (Other things go into this as well, like line drive percentage, groundball percentage, homerun/flyball percentage, etc., but we’ll ignore that for now).
Why is this important? Well, we all know that baseball involves a lot of luck. BABIP is an effective and simple way of determining who is lucky and who is actually going to continue hitting .342. The overall BABIP of the league is roughly .300. So if a player is batting .380 but has a .505 BABIP, what does this tell you? It tells you that his extraordinary luck will not last, and that his .380 average will not last. (For a case-in-point, see Cervelli, Francisco.)
Now, BABIPs do change a bit between players. Derek Jeter’s career BABIP is .357, which is very high. But he has been doing it for 15 years, so the large sample size dictates that one would actually expect his BABIP to be around .357, so if his BABIP is .300, one would expect his luck to turn around and his average to rise (of course, in Jeter’s case, there is the likelihood that his age is slowing him down and that he won’t see too many .357 BABIPs again, but that is beside the point.)
But guys like Jeter are the exception. Most BABIPs hover around .300. So if you see a guy with a BABIP of .200 or .400, you know to expect his luck to change as the season goes on.
Weighted On-Base Average (wOBA). This is the mother of all hitting statistics, in my arrogant opinion. It makes it very easy to quickly evaluate how good a hitter is. You don’t need a triple slash line or strikeout rates or anything—this statistic pretty much covers everything.
In the abstract, it somewhat combines slugging percentage and on base percentage, by assigning various weights to the different outcomes of an at bat. A single, for instance, simply gets a 1.000. So if someone hit only singles, and hits them in half of their plate appearances, they would have a wOBA of .500. However, walks are weighted slightly less than hits, as walks are slightly less effective. Doubles are weighted at a higher rate, with triples higher still, and home runs the highest weight (somewhere around 1.9 per home run, though I do not remember precisely.) So in the end, you get one tidy number that encompasses basically all of a player’s hitting skills (though it does not take into account base running skills.) Better still, you can easily determine whether a hitter is above average or not. In any given year, “average” changes, but mostly, the average wOBA (which happens to be always exactly equal to the average OBP) is around .333. So if a player has a wOBA of .350, he is a good hitter. A wOBA of .400 means he is a spectacular hitter, and .450+ means he is getting into Mickey Mantle-in-his-prime territory. I have not done exhaustive research but I believe the only hitter to have ever achieved a .600 wOBA for a season was Babe Ruth. One great thing about advanced statistics is they put in perspective—yet again—how much better than anyone else Babe Ruth was.
Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR)
Defense! It is a particularly important part of any self-respecting sport, and yet in baseball we tend to ignore it. But it easily explains why for years, Yankee pitching staffs seemed to perform ruinously no matter who the actual pitchers were. Well, that will happen when you have Bernie Williams (-29 UZR) and Gary Sheffield (-26 UZR, and probably one of the worst defenders in the history of the game) in the outfield. Now what does UZR mean?
It measures how many runs above or below average a fielder saved or lost in a given season based on his range, arm, etc. They determine it by dividing the field up into tiny “zones” and then calculating how many of the balls that land in each zone a particular defender reaches and they compare this with other defenders and then put it all through a formula that I don’t quite understand and come out with a number. This number is a +/- number. So, a completely average defender would have a UZR of 0.0. A slightly above average defender would have single digits, a very good defender would be in the teens, and a superb defender would be in the 20s. Andruw Jones in his prime would be in the low thirties. This works the other way, also. So, with defenders like Bernie and Gary, the Yankees were giving up hits (and hence, runs) all over the place, through no fault of the pitchers. It was not just two culprits, either. In fact, the only Yankee in 2005 who was a plus defender was A-Rod at third base. Jeter was horrific (somewhere around -14.5), Cano was a rookie and horrific (-20ish) and everyone else was at least mildly horrific, hence the grand total of 150 runs lost.
But what exactly does that mean? What does it mean to lose 30 runs in the field? It means 3 losses. A win roughly corresponds to ten runs. So a fielder who is a +20 defender will win his team about two games over the course of a season that an average player would not. A Bernie Williams circa 2005 will lose his team about 3 games just by sucking in centerfield. Really, Gary Sheffield is more amazingly incompetent, though, because he is a right fielder. Shortstops and center fielders have the most effect on the game, defensively (after the pitcher, of course.) So their numbers are usually larger in either direction. To be that bad in right field took talent on Sheff’s part. He was a gargoyle out there.
Pitchers.
Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP). So what is there to be done about the unfortunate fact that pitchers can’t control the fielders behind them? There are only three things that can happen in a given at bat. A walk/hit-by-pitch, a strikeout, or the hitter puts the ball into play. Once the hitter has put the ball in play, it is almost entirely out of the pitcher’s control. He can affect how often the ball is on the ground (groundballs don’t do as much damage, given their lack of potential for extra bases) to some extent, but mostly, a pitcher can control two things: how often he walks batters, and how often he strikes them out. Anything else is heavily dependent on the defense behind him.
FIP takes walks, strikeouts and home runs, puts them into an equation {(HR*13+(BB+HBP-IBB)*3-K*2)/IP, in case you are interested} and then adds a number (usually around 3.2) to scale the number to ERA so that you can understand what you are looking at. For instance, an ERA of 3.00 is very good. A FIP of 3.00 is very good.
But FIP is better than ERA because you’ll notice that it doesn’t depend on the runs the pitcher actually gave up. Now, you might say: “That’s ridiculous! That is exactly what we are trying to figure out!” but actually, what you are trying to figure out is how good a pitcher is, which, thanks to baseball’s inherent randomness, is not always reflected by the runs he gave up. A pitcher can give up ten hits in a game and still give up few runs because of some ridiculous line-out-into-a-triple-play here or there, and he can give up two hits and still give up four runs in six innings because those two hits were home runs.
Of course, both of these cases are extremes, but in the middle there is a ton of room for error based on how good the second basemen is. If he is spectacular, saving balls into the hole all of the time, this will have a huge effect on the game as compared to a bad second basemen. ERA is fooled by this. FIP is not. Ubaldo Jimenez had a sparkling ERA in the first half, but his FIP was not nearly so spectacular. As the season has worn on, his FIP proved far more accurate. In fact, his FIP indicates that his ERA will continue to rise even further, in all likelihood. On the other hand, that Cliff Lee fellow is nothing less than sparkling. His FIP is nearly identical to his 2.40 ERA, showing that it isn’t a magic trick. He is just that good.
BABIP Against. What? I already mentioned this? Surely you could predict that if BABIP is useful for hitters, it is equally useful for pitchers. It turns out that pitchers have even less control over a batted ball’s eventual outcome than a hitter. If a hitter’s BABIP strays from .300, he might have the ability (or lack thereof) to keep it there. For pitchers, this is very rare. Even the great Mariano Rivera, he of the unhittable pitch, he of the cutter that destroys more wood than the evil Hexxus of Fern Gully, has a career BABIP Against of .273. .273! If someone gets the ball in play on Mo, the chances of it dropping in for a hit are… still almost the same as against everyone else. And this is Mariano Rivera. If he can’t get a BABIP much below .300, no one else can either.
So of course, the same logic applies to pitchers as hitters, only in reverse. If a pitcher has a very high BABIP, he is getting very unlucky and you should not get too worried. If his BABIP is ridiculously low, he will come back to earth. Not to keep picking on Ubaldo Jimenez, but his BABIP is .254. So, the hits will start dropping in eventually.
It is worth mentioning that while Joba Chamberlain has been an apparent disaster this year… His underlying stats are not terrible. His FIP is actually 3.02, which is plenty respectable. His ERA is almost six. Maybe this can be explained in part by a psychological inability to pitch with runners on, but I bet his BABIP of .393 (!) has more to do with it.
The All Inclusive Statistic: WAR
WAR, as far as baseball is concerned, is not an armed conflict with caps lock turned on. It stands for Wins Above Replacement, and it includes everything you can include to come up with a single statistic that shows how useful given player was for a given year. The best part is it is easily understandable. We all know what wins are! Still, it requires some explanation.
First off, to be a number of wins above replacement level, we need to know what replacement level is. It is the level of player you could get off the scrap heap: a borderline AAA/major league guy, a barely-able-to-play-but-just-good-enough-to-possibly-stick-around-for-a-few-seconds kind of guy.
So this is not an “average” player. Average players are actually worth about 2.0 WAR. Good players are worth 3-5 WAR, great players 5-7, anything above 7.5 is fantastic, and once you get into the 9-10 area, only Alex Rodriguez, Albert Pujols and Barry Bonds really know what you are talking about on the hitting side; on the pitching side, Randy Johnson, Roger Clemens et al saw 9-10s in their best seasons. Pedro once got a 12. His 1999 season was, shall we say, one for the ages.
So had the Red Sox not had him in 1999, they would have won 12 fewer games. That is what WAR tells you. It takes into account everything: hitting, fielding, base running, position and importantly, durability, since it is not an average but a counting statistic. If you only play half the season, that will show up in your WAR because it will be about half as large. To calculate WAR for pitchers is very difficult, for hitters slightly less difficult. But either way, who cares. The point is that it gives you a useable number that takes into account everything, and explains why Derek Jeter was the best shortstop in the league last year, and the best player on the Yankees. This year he has been about league average. That is terrifying, by the way, given his age. It is quite the precipitous drop.
You can get all of these statistics for free on fangraphs.com, by the way. They go back a long while, too. So Babe Ruth? Had a 14 WAR season once. Very cool.
Obviously, you didn’t need WAR to convince you that Babe Ruth was the greatest player ever. But how about Ben Zobrist? You even heard of him? Turns out that by WAR, he was the best position player in the American League last year. Now you know that wins are useless, that Ben Zobrist exists, and that Babe Ruth is the greatest player of all time by a lot. Hope that helped.
~The Sports Maunderer~
Once upon a time, I asked someone why “Runs Scored” was not a baseball statistic to which anyone paid attention, while runs batted in brought out the googly-eyes. The answer I got was that while getting on base is under the control of a player, whether or not the next guy up knocks them in is out of their control, so runs do not adequately reflect an innate ability to score so much as the luck of who is up after them. While I mostly accepted this explanation—I was nine years old or something, I was not going to nitpick too much—it bothered me. I understood the logic; I just did not understand why it only applied to runs. How were RBIs any different in their relative arbitrariness?
About a decade later, I finally got the answer: they aren’t. They aren’t at all.
To continue with the personal anecdotes (I despise the narcissism inherent in personal anecdotes, but alas, I am not a good enough writer to entirely avoid them), as a nascent teenager, I began to take issue with the phrase that even the best hitters fail seven out of ten times. This phrase is based on the notion that very good hitters have averages in the .300 range, hence they fail to get a hit seven out of ten times. The problem with this is that hits and outs are not the only possible outcomes. Walks are a huge part of the game, and the best hitters have on base percentages in the .400 range, not the .300 range. Hence, the best hitters fail only six out of ten times. Which is barely more than half of the time.
Why do these boring personal histories and seemingly petulant statistical problems matter? Here is why they matter:
The Kansas City Royals currently lead the American League in batting average. They are tenth in the league in runs scored. How to explain this?
Ubaldo Jimenez’s crazy beginning to the year (ERA consistently under 1) masked the fact that he wasn’t even the third best pitcher in the National League. I commented to a friend of mine on Facebook that Jimenez was due for quite the reality check, and, lo and behold, his ERA is now nearly two full runs higher. I don’t mention this to toot my own prognosticative horn; nay, I do it to point out that it was incredibly obvious that Jimenez’s numbers were somewhat fraudulent. Very good pitcher? Of course. In the league of Josh Johnson and Roy Halladay? Definitely not.
As a personal one for Yankee fans: do you remember how for almost the entire last decade, it seemed like every time a pitcher came to the Yankees, no matter how impressive his pedigree, he sucked? And as soon as pitchers left the Yankees, no matter how unimpressive their pedigrees, they suddenly found a fountain of talent they had never known about before? This was not an illusion. This actually happened. And there is a very good reason for it.
Another somewhat personal tidbit for Yankee fans: Francisco Cervelli, he of the backup catching duties, was batting .400 for a surprisingly large portion of the season as he filled in for Jorge Posada. Now, no one in their right mind thought he would keep that pace up, but did they realize just how lucky he was getting, and that he was due for a gigantic regression that has him hitting around the Mendoza line since his early hot streak? I did. Again, not because I’m brilliant (well, maybe I am, but that is beside the point.) I just happen to have the website Fangraphs.com as a favorite on my computer.
Much of baseball is a mystery, obviously. Any game where the best team in the league loses 35-40% of the time is hard to predict. But it becomes much easier to predict, and the game makes much more sense, if you give up on the classic baseball stats which do more to hide the reality of the game than reveal it. And if you replace them with advanced statistics—wOBA, FIP, UZR, WAR—all of the sudden it makes sense why Derek Jeter was one of the best players in the league last year, and Mark Teixeira was simply very good, despite out-homering and out-RBI-ing the Yankee shortstop by a wide, wide margin.
So that is what we are going to do. I am going to run through the most important/easy-to-use advanced stats, what they mean, and some examples to show why they are so important, and so much more valid than traditional stats. I will also run through the traditional stats that are absolutely, utterly, and in every way completely useless—and of course, explain why. Then I will list (if we can even use that word) the rare traditional stats that are not completely useless. Depending on how broad your concept of “traditional” stat is, this could be many, or it could be none. So let us get started.
The Utterly Absurd
Wins. There is no stat—none—more pathetic, more useless, less indicative of a player’s actual value, than the “win.” It means an ounce of honey more than nothing. A pitcher has so little control over this statistic that it is a sad indictment against the collective intelligence of humanity that this statistic has survived this long. Once upon a time, when starting pitchers all threw complete games, the stat still made very little sense, but at least it was somewhat defensible. Now, in the era of specialty bullpens, six inning pitchers, closers, etcetera—it is indefensible. Alfredo Aceves—yeah, the one and only—was 10-1 last year. 10-1. Alfredo Aceves is, at best, a mediocre pitcher, yet he had a record that would make Pedro Martinez circa 1999 jealous. Meanwhile, the Cy Young Award winner in the American League last year—the deserved winner, I might add—won a meager sixteen games. Zach Greinke, a pitcher for the Royals, was head and shoulders above everyone else in the AL, but his wins are paltry because his team stunk. A lot. The inanity of this “statistic” (its hold on that title is about as legitimate as “times the first basemen blows a bubble”) is so overwhelming that whatever paltry writing skills I do possess simply go out the window as I become frustrated writing about it. So let’s just list some adjectives. Insane. Garbage. Ridiculous. Absurd. Counter-productive. Idiotic. Regressive. Neanderthal.
Runs Batted In. This stat is not quite as egregious as the win because while it does not give you any real measure of a player’s worth, it does at least give you an idea of something that happened in the game. You look at a box score and see that someone had two RBIs, and while this tells you nothing about whether he is a particularly good player or not, it does tell you that he actually came up with runners on base and got some sort of hit or something. Not much, but it is something. (Although, it is even really less than it seems, because he could have grounded into two double plays for those two RBIs. You really don’t know.) The numbers 3 and 4 hitters for teams will almost always have the most RBIs completely regardless of how good they actually are. Mark Teixeira, despite his putrid first halves, always ends with decent RBI numbers around the All Star Break, because Derek Jeter, Nick Swisher, et al are on base so often that he could ground out to first (which he does a lot) and still pick up his RBIs. This happens so often in baseball that you would think people would have gotten over their fascination with RBIs, but what can we say. Old habits and all that. (The case in point here is Ryan Howard. He is a decent though not spectacular first basemen, but because Chase Utley and the other Phillies in front of him are always on base, he has had huge RBI totals the last few seasons. This doesn’t make him any better than Adrian Gonzalez, it just means his team is better. But because we want RBIs to mean something for some reason, he just got signed to a mind-boggling five year, 125 million dollar contract. Go figure.)
Not Very Useful But Not Opprobrious
Batting Average. As mentioned previously, the Kansas City Royals lead the league in batting average. Being faithful readers, you are intelligent enough to know that the Royals stink like a flamingo run through a wood chipper. If batting average meant a lot, you would think that this couldn’t happen, eh?
The truth is: batting average is infinitely inferior to another statistic, on base percentage. On base percentage itself is somewhat flawed (we’ll get to the super duper stat that fixes most of these flaws later), but it is quite useable, and more importantly, it is so easy. OBP is not any more difficult to understand than batting average. It is not VORP or xFIP or Bohr’s Law or something. It is the exact same thing as batting average except that it takes into account walks and hit-by-pitches. This is, quite simply, a better statistic than batting average. Extremely rare is the moment when batting average gives a better idea of someone’s skill level than OBP. I’m having difficulty finding a single instance of such a scenario. If one guy hits .280 but has an OBP of .400, while another guy hits .320 but has an OBP of .350, ceteris paribus, the guy with the OBP of .400 is not only better, he is significantly better.
Guys with high OBPs, due to their plate discipline, often have high averages. And guys with high averages often have high OBPs because if pitchers know they can just throw the ball out of the zone and you will chase it, your average likely won’t be very high. But often is not always, and it is plenty common to see guys with low averages and high OBPs (Nick Swisher, for instance) or guys with low OBPs relative to their average (Robinson Cano, for instance).
The most important thing a batter can do is not make an out. There is nothing more important he can do. If no batter on the team makes an out, the team will score tons of runs, obviously. OBP captures exactly how successful a batter is at not making an out. Batting average does not. It is that simple.
Earned Run Average. This is not a useless statistic. It does give you, in some instances, a modicum of an idea of how well a pitcher has performed. But in reality, it does not give you much of one. Reliance on ERA is, in fact, one of the reasons that Yankee pitching staffs of the mid-decade seemed far worse than they actually were. ERA completely discounts a huge aspect of the game: defense.
Once a hitter puts the ball in play, the pitcher has almost nothing to say about whether it is a hit or not. He is entirely reliant on 1) whether the ball stays in the park and 2) if it does, whether the fielders get to it. For the period from around 2002-2008, the Yankees consistently boasted one of, if not the worst, defenses in the league. An argument—a strong argument—can be made that their defense in 2005 was the worst in the history of the game. Their 2005 defense gave up 150 (!) runs more than an average defense that year. 150!!! For perspective, in the past decade, no other defense even gave up 100 more runs than average. 2005 was historically bad, made to seem less so only because the surrounding years involved horrific defense as well.
Of course, none of this shows up in ERA. When Bernie Williams’ corpse fails to reach easy fly after easy fly, they are listed as hits and the hits are turned into “earned” runs (whatever that even means) which compile to make a pitcher’s ERA look very bad. Stick the same pitcher on the 2008 Tampa Bay Rays (they of the defense awesome enough to carry them to a World Series berth) and the same pitcher would look drastically better.
Honorable Mentions
Slugging percentage, i.e. how many bases a hitter gets per at bat, is a pretty useful tool. It gives a very good idea of how much power a particular hitter has. It isn’t foolproof, but a triple slash (batting average/on-base-percentage/slugging percentage) can usually give you a pretty good idea whether a hitter is good or not. For instance, a hitter with a .250/.300/.350 line is bad. Very bad. A hitter with a .250/.350/.550 line is actually pretty decent. A hitter with a .250/.400/.580 line is a monster. Notice how they all had the same batting average. And these aren’t just wacky possibilities I pulled out of a hat. These kinds of batting lines are very common. It’s why the Yankees score more runs—a lot more runs—than the Royals, despite having far inferior batting averages. The fact is that batting average is not important. Getting on base and hitting the ball far are much more important, and these are reflected in OBP and slugging.
Mariano Rivera’s ERA: as we will see in a moment, the more advanced stats almost always underrate Mariano Rivera, for the very simple reason that he often breaks bats more than he misses them. Yet given that he has consistently outperformed his the expectations of advanced stats for over a decade, the large sample size dictates that he simply is better than his FIP (don’t worry, we are getting there….) indicates. So as with everything else, Mariano is simply the ineffable exception.
The Statistics That Do Matter
There are far too many to list them all. Some are also really complicated, and some are too narrowly focused (i.e. groundball versus line drive percentage, etc.) to be of much use on an everyday basis. So I picked my five or six favorites based on their usefulness, ease in understanding them, their broadness, and their awesomeness. I invented that last metric. Let’s go with position players first.
Batting Average on Balls In Play (BABIP). This is an undeniably useful statistic. Basically, it says how often a ball drops in for a hit after the hitter has already put it in play. It turns out that hitters do not have much control over this. We like to think that good hitters “hit them where they ain’t” but in fact, the only way to really guarantee a hit is to knock it entirely out of the park. For the vast majority of times where that doesn’t happen, a player’s BABIP is more dependent on speed than anything else. For instance, Brett Gardner’s BABIP will generally be good, whereas Prince Fielder’s will probably be lower. (Other things go into this as well, like line drive percentage, groundball percentage, homerun/flyball percentage, etc., but we’ll ignore that for now).
Why is this important? Well, we all know that baseball involves a lot of luck. BABIP is an effective and simple way of determining who is lucky and who is actually going to continue hitting .342. The overall BABIP of the league is roughly .300. So if a player is batting .380 but has a .505 BABIP, what does this tell you? It tells you that his extraordinary luck will not last, and that his .380 average will not last. (For a case-in-point, see Cervelli, Francisco.)
Now, BABIPs do change a bit between players. Derek Jeter’s career BABIP is .357, which is very high. But he has been doing it for 15 years, so the large sample size dictates that one would actually expect his BABIP to be around .357, so if his BABIP is .300, one would expect his luck to turn around and his average to rise (of course, in Jeter’s case, there is the likelihood that his age is slowing him down and that he won’t see too many .357 BABIPs again, but that is beside the point.)
But guys like Jeter are the exception. Most BABIPs hover around .300. So if you see a guy with a BABIP of .200 or .400, you know to expect his luck to change as the season goes on.
Weighted On-Base Average (wOBA). This is the mother of all hitting statistics, in my arrogant opinion. It makes it very easy to quickly evaluate how good a hitter is. You don’t need a triple slash line or strikeout rates or anything—this statistic pretty much covers everything.
In the abstract, it somewhat combines slugging percentage and on base percentage, by assigning various weights to the different outcomes of an at bat. A single, for instance, simply gets a 1.000. So if someone hit only singles, and hits them in half of their plate appearances, they would have a wOBA of .500. However, walks are weighted slightly less than hits, as walks are slightly less effective. Doubles are weighted at a higher rate, with triples higher still, and home runs the highest weight (somewhere around 1.9 per home run, though I do not remember precisely.) So in the end, you get one tidy number that encompasses basically all of a player’s hitting skills (though it does not take into account base running skills.) Better still, you can easily determine whether a hitter is above average or not. In any given year, “average” changes, but mostly, the average wOBA (which happens to be always exactly equal to the average OBP) is around .333. So if a player has a wOBA of .350, he is a good hitter. A wOBA of .400 means he is a spectacular hitter, and .450+ means he is getting into Mickey Mantle-in-his-prime territory. I have not done exhaustive research but I believe the only hitter to have ever achieved a .600 wOBA for a season was Babe Ruth. One great thing about advanced statistics is they put in perspective—yet again—how much better than anyone else Babe Ruth was.
Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR)
Defense! It is a particularly important part of any self-respecting sport, and yet in baseball we tend to ignore it. But it easily explains why for years, Yankee pitching staffs seemed to perform ruinously no matter who the actual pitchers were. Well, that will happen when you have Bernie Williams (-29 UZR) and Gary Sheffield (-26 UZR, and probably one of the worst defenders in the history of the game) in the outfield. Now what does UZR mean?
It measures how many runs above or below average a fielder saved or lost in a given season based on his range, arm, etc. They determine it by dividing the field up into tiny “zones” and then calculating how many of the balls that land in each zone a particular defender reaches and they compare this with other defenders and then put it all through a formula that I don’t quite understand and come out with a number. This number is a +/- number. So, a completely average defender would have a UZR of 0.0. A slightly above average defender would have single digits, a very good defender would be in the teens, and a superb defender would be in the 20s. Andruw Jones in his prime would be in the low thirties. This works the other way, also. So, with defenders like Bernie and Gary, the Yankees were giving up hits (and hence, runs) all over the place, through no fault of the pitchers. It was not just two culprits, either. In fact, the only Yankee in 2005 who was a plus defender was A-Rod at third base. Jeter was horrific (somewhere around -14.5), Cano was a rookie and horrific (-20ish) and everyone else was at least mildly horrific, hence the grand total of 150 runs lost.
But what exactly does that mean? What does it mean to lose 30 runs in the field? It means 3 losses. A win roughly corresponds to ten runs. So a fielder who is a +20 defender will win his team about two games over the course of a season that an average player would not. A Bernie Williams circa 2005 will lose his team about 3 games just by sucking in centerfield. Really, Gary Sheffield is more amazingly incompetent, though, because he is a right fielder. Shortstops and center fielders have the most effect on the game, defensively (after the pitcher, of course.) So their numbers are usually larger in either direction. To be that bad in right field took talent on Sheff’s part. He was a gargoyle out there.
Pitchers.
Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP). So what is there to be done about the unfortunate fact that pitchers can’t control the fielders behind them? There are only three things that can happen in a given at bat. A walk/hit-by-pitch, a strikeout, or the hitter puts the ball into play. Once the hitter has put the ball in play, it is almost entirely out of the pitcher’s control. He can affect how often the ball is on the ground (groundballs don’t do as much damage, given their lack of potential for extra bases) to some extent, but mostly, a pitcher can control two things: how often he walks batters, and how often he strikes them out. Anything else is heavily dependent on the defense behind him.
FIP takes walks, strikeouts and home runs, puts them into an equation {(HR*13+(BB+HBP-IBB)*3-K*2)/IP, in case you are interested} and then adds a number (usually around 3.2) to scale the number to ERA so that you can understand what you are looking at. For instance, an ERA of 3.00 is very good. A FIP of 3.00 is very good.
But FIP is better than ERA because you’ll notice that it doesn’t depend on the runs the pitcher actually gave up. Now, you might say: “That’s ridiculous! That is exactly what we are trying to figure out!” but actually, what you are trying to figure out is how good a pitcher is, which, thanks to baseball’s inherent randomness, is not always reflected by the runs he gave up. A pitcher can give up ten hits in a game and still give up few runs because of some ridiculous line-out-into-a-triple-play here or there, and he can give up two hits and still give up four runs in six innings because those two hits were home runs.
Of course, both of these cases are extremes, but in the middle there is a ton of room for error based on how good the second basemen is. If he is spectacular, saving balls into the hole all of the time, this will have a huge effect on the game as compared to a bad second basemen. ERA is fooled by this. FIP is not. Ubaldo Jimenez had a sparkling ERA in the first half, but his FIP was not nearly so spectacular. As the season has worn on, his FIP proved far more accurate. In fact, his FIP indicates that his ERA will continue to rise even further, in all likelihood. On the other hand, that Cliff Lee fellow is nothing less than sparkling. His FIP is nearly identical to his 2.40 ERA, showing that it isn’t a magic trick. He is just that good.
BABIP Against. What? I already mentioned this? Surely you could predict that if BABIP is useful for hitters, it is equally useful for pitchers. It turns out that pitchers have even less control over a batted ball’s eventual outcome than a hitter. If a hitter’s BABIP strays from .300, he might have the ability (or lack thereof) to keep it there. For pitchers, this is very rare. Even the great Mariano Rivera, he of the unhittable pitch, he of the cutter that destroys more wood than the evil Hexxus of Fern Gully, has a career BABIP Against of .273. .273! If someone gets the ball in play on Mo, the chances of it dropping in for a hit are… still almost the same as against everyone else. And this is Mariano Rivera. If he can’t get a BABIP much below .300, no one else can either.
So of course, the same logic applies to pitchers as hitters, only in reverse. If a pitcher has a very high BABIP, he is getting very unlucky and you should not get too worried. If his BABIP is ridiculously low, he will come back to earth. Not to keep picking on Ubaldo Jimenez, but his BABIP is .254. So, the hits will start dropping in eventually.
It is worth mentioning that while Joba Chamberlain has been an apparent disaster this year… His underlying stats are not terrible. His FIP is actually 3.02, which is plenty respectable. His ERA is almost six. Maybe this can be explained in part by a psychological inability to pitch with runners on, but I bet his BABIP of .393 (!) has more to do with it.
The All Inclusive Statistic: WAR
WAR, as far as baseball is concerned, is not an armed conflict with caps lock turned on. It stands for Wins Above Replacement, and it includes everything you can include to come up with a single statistic that shows how useful given player was for a given year. The best part is it is easily understandable. We all know what wins are! Still, it requires some explanation.
First off, to be a number of wins above replacement level, we need to know what replacement level is. It is the level of player you could get off the scrap heap: a borderline AAA/major league guy, a barely-able-to-play-but-just-good-enough-to-possibly-stick-around-for-a-few-seconds kind of guy.
So this is not an “average” player. Average players are actually worth about 2.0 WAR. Good players are worth 3-5 WAR, great players 5-7, anything above 7.5 is fantastic, and once you get into the 9-10 area, only Alex Rodriguez, Albert Pujols and Barry Bonds really know what you are talking about on the hitting side; on the pitching side, Randy Johnson, Roger Clemens et al saw 9-10s in their best seasons. Pedro once got a 12. His 1999 season was, shall we say, one for the ages.
So had the Red Sox not had him in 1999, they would have won 12 fewer games. That is what WAR tells you. It takes into account everything: hitting, fielding, base running, position and importantly, durability, since it is not an average but a counting statistic. If you only play half the season, that will show up in your WAR because it will be about half as large. To calculate WAR for pitchers is very difficult, for hitters slightly less difficult. But either way, who cares. The point is that it gives you a useable number that takes into account everything, and explains why Derek Jeter was the best shortstop in the league last year, and the best player on the Yankees. This year he has been about league average. That is terrifying, by the way, given his age. It is quite the precipitous drop.
You can get all of these statistics for free on fangraphs.com, by the way. They go back a long while, too. So Babe Ruth? Had a 14 WAR season once. Very cool.
Obviously, you didn’t need WAR to convince you that Babe Ruth was the greatest player ever. But how about Ben Zobrist? You even heard of him? Turns out that by WAR, he was the best position player in the American League last year. Now you know that wins are useless, that Ben Zobrist exists, and that Babe Ruth is the greatest player of all time by a lot. Hope that helped.
~The Sports Maunderer~
Friday, June 25, 2010
Soccer*
As most of you know, I am in The Netherlands. The Netherlands happens to be in Europe. Europe likes soccer* a lot. As in, it seems to be the only thing they are truly passionate about. The World Cup, in a surprising coincidence, is currently ongoing. So everyone in The Netherlands is basically eating, sleeping and watching soccer. They go to the bathroom at half time. Since it has been on so often, I have accidentally watched quite a bit of it. Obviously I would never have allowed this to happen purposefully, but there are some things to take away from the often gruesome experience.
In 90 minutes, you are lucky to get five moments worth mentioning. That’s pathetic. More stuff happens in 3 minutes on a basketball court than in an entire soccer match.
When things do happen, they are usually pretty impressive. It takes an extraordinary amount of luck to even get into the position where you might score, but once there, it takes an extraordinary amount of skill just to have a chance to actually finish it off. And it doesn’t take as long to be able to sense who is good and who isn’t as you might think. Watch Brazil for 90 minutes and you’ll see an average of 2-3 HOLY !@#$#$% moments. Watch the U.S. for 90 minutes, and more than likely you’ll just see England screw up.
The noise is awful. I mean, you cannot exaggerate how terrible the vuvuzelas (or however you spell it) are. You cannot.
The lack of commercials would be great, except that the actual match is so horrendously boring that at times you are begging for a carbon copy beer commercial with tanned models laughing and drinking Heineken as they not so subtly-imply that alcohol will make you buff, happy and able to perform incredible stunts. And not just any alcohol. Only their brand. The other brands make you lame.
The camera angle sucks. Everyone appears to be moving in slow motion. Seriously, Usain Bolt could be running from one side of the field to other, and the super-zoomed-out camera would make it seem like he was lightly jogging. You don’t need to see the entire field at once, all the time. Zoom in, for crying out loud. Are World Cup Camera operators so bad that they can’t be trusted to follow the action at all, to the point where they are given orders to simply pull back until you see nearly everything from one goalie to the other?
Bad refs can absolutely destroy the game. Destroy it. As much as we complain about officiating in United States’ sports—and believe me, there is plenty to complain about—when an NBA referee messes up a call, it might swing the game 2 points. That is 98 less points than the team is likely to score. When an umpire misses a strike call, the count is 1-0 instead of 0-1. When a soccer referee makes a bad call, it costs a team a berth in the elimination round of the tournament that only comes every four years. That is indefensible. That is awful. That makes it hard to stomach such a sport.
So how to make soccer more interesting? Well, it is quite obvious. Take some men off the freaking field!!! With only, say, seven guys on a team, there would be so much more open space, so much more attacking, so much more room for sensational plays. There would be more scoring, more amazing moves, and even more amazing defense, as people would have to actually go for the ball as opposed to conglomerating into an eleven-man amoeba that blocks out the sun and makes scoring utterly impossible. Additionally, with so many more scoring chances, a single referee mistake will not cast quite as long of a shadow.
Why does soccer have so many players? Seriously, what is the point. Where in history did someone decide that muddying up the field with as many people as possible was the way to go about it? Did that hypothetical stupid person also have the following idea for tennis: “Forget singles and doubles. Let’s play with ten people on a team! That will be even more fun!”?
I want people to explain to me why there are so many freaking people on a soccer field. If I don’t get a good explanation, I shall continue to mock the sport mercilessly. If I do get a good explanation, I will continue to mock England’s porous defense mercilessly.
~The Sports Maunderer~
*I would like to call it football, because, seriously, it makes a lot more sense. But if an American says football, Europeans assume he means American football. So I have to say soccer simply because that is expected. Although, if the U.S. ever wins the World Cup someday, I am completely behind Jon Stewart’s idea that the whole world must then call it “soccer”.
In 90 minutes, you are lucky to get five moments worth mentioning. That’s pathetic. More stuff happens in 3 minutes on a basketball court than in an entire soccer match.
When things do happen, they are usually pretty impressive. It takes an extraordinary amount of luck to even get into the position where you might score, but once there, it takes an extraordinary amount of skill just to have a chance to actually finish it off. And it doesn’t take as long to be able to sense who is good and who isn’t as you might think. Watch Brazil for 90 minutes and you’ll see an average of 2-3 HOLY !@#$#$% moments. Watch the U.S. for 90 minutes, and more than likely you’ll just see England screw up.
The noise is awful. I mean, you cannot exaggerate how terrible the vuvuzelas (or however you spell it) are. You cannot.
The lack of commercials would be great, except that the actual match is so horrendously boring that at times you are begging for a carbon copy beer commercial with tanned models laughing and drinking Heineken as they not so subtly-imply that alcohol will make you buff, happy and able to perform incredible stunts. And not just any alcohol. Only their brand. The other brands make you lame.
The camera angle sucks. Everyone appears to be moving in slow motion. Seriously, Usain Bolt could be running from one side of the field to other, and the super-zoomed-out camera would make it seem like he was lightly jogging. You don’t need to see the entire field at once, all the time. Zoom in, for crying out loud. Are World Cup Camera operators so bad that they can’t be trusted to follow the action at all, to the point where they are given orders to simply pull back until you see nearly everything from one goalie to the other?
Bad refs can absolutely destroy the game. Destroy it. As much as we complain about officiating in United States’ sports—and believe me, there is plenty to complain about—when an NBA referee messes up a call, it might swing the game 2 points. That is 98 less points than the team is likely to score. When an umpire misses a strike call, the count is 1-0 instead of 0-1. When a soccer referee makes a bad call, it costs a team a berth in the elimination round of the tournament that only comes every four years. That is indefensible. That is awful. That makes it hard to stomach such a sport.
So how to make soccer more interesting? Well, it is quite obvious. Take some men off the freaking field!!! With only, say, seven guys on a team, there would be so much more open space, so much more attacking, so much more room for sensational plays. There would be more scoring, more amazing moves, and even more amazing defense, as people would have to actually go for the ball as opposed to conglomerating into an eleven-man amoeba that blocks out the sun and makes scoring utterly impossible. Additionally, with so many more scoring chances, a single referee mistake will not cast quite as long of a shadow.
Why does soccer have so many players? Seriously, what is the point. Where in history did someone decide that muddying up the field with as many people as possible was the way to go about it? Did that hypothetical stupid person also have the following idea for tennis: “Forget singles and doubles. Let’s play with ten people on a team! That will be even more fun!”?
I want people to explain to me why there are so many freaking people on a soccer field. If I don’t get a good explanation, I shall continue to mock the sport mercilessly. If I do get a good explanation, I will continue to mock England’s porous defense mercilessly.
~The Sports Maunderer~
*I would like to call it football, because, seriously, it makes a lot more sense. But if an American says football, Europeans assume he means American football. So I have to say soccer simply because that is expected. Although, if the U.S. ever wins the World Cup someday, I am completely behind Jon Stewart’s idea that the whole world must then call it “soccer”.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
This is absurd
You thought I was just pulling something out of thin air, didn't you? With that rant about the random adding of "ee" sounds onto the end of baseball players names (first noticed when Joe Girardi referred to Brett Gardner as "Gardy").
But take a look at this.
Rays' manager Joe Maddon:
"[It was a] disappointing 3-3 homestand, but nevertheless, better than 2-4," Maddon said. "I thought we played with a lot of intensity. I thought these were very intense games. ... We did a lot of good things, but the Yankees beat us two out of three. [Saturday's] starter [CC Sabathia] would have beaten anybody. Today, Shieldsie gave us a chance but they got to us late."
Shieldsie. Shieldsie. Shieldsie!!!!!
Will this madness never end?!
~The Sports Maunderer~
But take a look at this.
Rays' manager Joe Maddon:
"[It was a] disappointing 3-3 homestand, but nevertheless, better than 2-4," Maddon said. "I thought we played with a lot of intensity. I thought these were very intense games. ... We did a lot of good things, but the Yankees beat us two out of three. [Saturday's] starter [CC Sabathia] would have beaten anybody. Today, Shieldsie gave us a chance but they got to us late."
Shieldsie. Shieldsie. Shieldsie!!!!!
Will this madness never end?!
~The Sports Maunderer~
Friday, February 12, 2010
Millsy
"I'm not into comparing and contrasting," Wade said. "Coop's a great baseball man, but things got rough from a win-loss standpoint last year. We're facing forward at this point and building off the strengths that Millsy brings to the table." (Emphasis Added)
Taken from a recent article on the Astros new manager, Brad Mills, this quote exemplifies a distressing trend in major league baseball: the need to add "y" onto everything.
Millsy? Are you kidding me? I can't even say that word out loud without feeling ridiculous. The guys name is Brad. Or Mills. Or Mr. Mills. It isn't "Millsy".
In the immortal words of Gob Bluth: "Come on!"
In other news... The Saints won the Super Bowl. Good for Drew Brees. Though this does mean I am going to have to endure ten more years of explaining to people why Peyton Manning is the greatest quarterback to ever play, as opposed to them simply admitting this. Alas. Of course, argumentatively convincing someone of a sports-related factoid is one of my strong-suits, so... I guess this could be a hidden boon. (Are "boon" and "bane" related in any way? They should be, even if they aren't. They mean almost the opposite thing and they sound eerily similar.)
Only a week until pitchers and catchers report. I'm salivating.
~The Sports Maunderer~
Taken from a recent article on the Astros new manager, Brad Mills, this quote exemplifies a distressing trend in major league baseball: the need to add "y" onto everything.
Millsy? Are you kidding me? I can't even say that word out loud without feeling ridiculous. The guys name is Brad. Or Mills. Or Mr. Mills. It isn't "Millsy".
In the immortal words of Gob Bluth: "Come on!"
In other news... The Saints won the Super Bowl. Good for Drew Brees. Though this does mean I am going to have to endure ten more years of explaining to people why Peyton Manning is the greatest quarterback to ever play, as opposed to them simply admitting this. Alas. Of course, argumentatively convincing someone of a sports-related factoid is one of my strong-suits, so... I guess this could be a hidden boon. (Are "boon" and "bane" related in any way? They should be, even if they aren't. They mean almost the opposite thing and they sound eerily similar.)
Only a week until pitchers and catchers report. I'm salivating.
~The Sports Maunderer~
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
The Worst Nicknames Ever
This is pretty simple. Clearly the Red Sox are badly named (why would we want images of sweaty, stinky socks to come to mind when thinking of a team), and clearly the Yankees are elegantly, felicitously named. But who has the worst nickname of all? After much (or a bit less than much) careful consideration, I have determined there are only a few candidates. And the winner (of the worst) is nigh indisputable.
5. White Sox/ Red Sox. This isn’t even a bias. I mean, I would find a way to get the Red Sox on here if it weren’t so painfully easy, but it was and is painfully easy. Who, on what day, in what city, at what hour, thought to themselves: “let’s name our team after socks!”
Socks.
4. Steelers. Naming your sports team after you city’s predominant occupation is silly enough (I’m looking at you Brewers… if that is your real predominant occupation…) Not thinking about the days when it no longer would be the predominant occupation, and in fact is doing nothing but holding back the image of a city that is well past its lung-choking days of industry and non-stop polluting machinations—also very dumb. But trying to turn a piece of metal into a verb? This is like naming a San Jose team the Siliconers. This is like naming a team from an area with lots of vineyards, the Winers. This is like naming a team from St. Louis (home to an Anheuser-Busch factory) the Beerers.
The Beerers.
3. Jazz. This name would be a spectacular one, if it were still where it belonged. In New Orleans. In Utah, it makes as much sense as a Latin Vulgate at a King James Only Convention. (As an aside, this name would quickly have become inane for New Orleans as well if they changed it to the “Jazzers.”) But instead, we have the Hornets in New Orleans. Which makes so much sense, because when I think of New Orleans, I think of Hornets.
2. Just leaving this spot open because no other name could possibly come close to the idiocy of the final name. The final name combines the hideous aspects of all the other names on here.
1. Lakers. First off, it tries to turn a noun into a verb again, where it just doesn’t work. (Laker? LAKER?! What in Tanzania is a “laker”?) Second, why, when playing basketball, would you want to be thinking of lakes? Or water, in general? Having played basketball, I can tell you, thinking of water makes you want to go get water. But lastly, and most importantly:
Anyone who has ever 1) been to Los Angeles, 2) Seen Chinatown or 3) looked at a map, knows this: Los Angeles is in the middle of a freaking desert. They made an entire movie about the fact that Los Angeles is in the middle of a freaking desert. Maps will attest to the fact that Los Angeles is in the middle of a freaking desert. There aren’t lakes anywhere nearby. The closest thing they have to a lake is the cavernous depths of Kobe Bryant’s ego, but that isn’t filled by water, it is filled with self-absorption, Nike shoes, and puppets of himself.
I’ll admit, the puppets are funny. But they don’t have a clue what a “laker” is, either.
~The Sports Maunderer~
5. White Sox/ Red Sox. This isn’t even a bias. I mean, I would find a way to get the Red Sox on here if it weren’t so painfully easy, but it was and is painfully easy. Who, on what day, in what city, at what hour, thought to themselves: “let’s name our team after socks!”
Socks.
4. Steelers. Naming your sports team after you city’s predominant occupation is silly enough (I’m looking at you Brewers… if that is your real predominant occupation…) Not thinking about the days when it no longer would be the predominant occupation, and in fact is doing nothing but holding back the image of a city that is well past its lung-choking days of industry and non-stop polluting machinations—also very dumb. But trying to turn a piece of metal into a verb? This is like naming a San Jose team the Siliconers. This is like naming a team from an area with lots of vineyards, the Winers. This is like naming a team from St. Louis (home to an Anheuser-Busch factory) the Beerers.
The Beerers.
3. Jazz. This name would be a spectacular one, if it were still where it belonged. In New Orleans. In Utah, it makes as much sense as a Latin Vulgate at a King James Only Convention. (As an aside, this name would quickly have become inane for New Orleans as well if they changed it to the “Jazzers.”) But instead, we have the Hornets in New Orleans. Which makes so much sense, because when I think of New Orleans, I think of Hornets.
2. Just leaving this spot open because no other name could possibly come close to the idiocy of the final name. The final name combines the hideous aspects of all the other names on here.
1. Lakers. First off, it tries to turn a noun into a verb again, where it just doesn’t work. (Laker? LAKER?! What in Tanzania is a “laker”?) Second, why, when playing basketball, would you want to be thinking of lakes? Or water, in general? Having played basketball, I can tell you, thinking of water makes you want to go get water. But lastly, and most importantly:
Anyone who has ever 1) been to Los Angeles, 2) Seen Chinatown or 3) looked at a map, knows this: Los Angeles is in the middle of a freaking desert. They made an entire movie about the fact that Los Angeles is in the middle of a freaking desert. Maps will attest to the fact that Los Angeles is in the middle of a freaking desert. There aren’t lakes anywhere nearby. The closest thing they have to a lake is the cavernous depths of Kobe Bryant’s ego, but that isn’t filled by water, it is filled with self-absorption, Nike shoes, and puppets of himself.
I’ll admit, the puppets are funny. But they don’t have a clue what a “laker” is, either.
~The Sports Maunderer~
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