Sabermetrics
by Brandon C. on Mar 14, 2010 9:00 AM EDT
in Miscellaneous
20 comments
The word itself confuses me. What are sabermetrics? Are they advanced statistics? Are they necessary to know to understand the game of baseball and write about it? How important are they? Throughout my blogging... career if you will... I have always avoided this post. Now that it is Spring Training and the regular season is near, I figured I needed to do it. I would now like to request any information you guys have on sabermetrics. I would like to become a sabermetricite (yes, I made up that idiotic word).
The only term I hear often is UZR. Honestly, I do not know what UZR even stands for. All I ask is for some assistance in understanding what sabermetrics are and what the most important sabermetrics are. Maybe some definitions would help and some readings. Are they necessary to know? Any and all help is appreciated! Thanks everyone!
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You need..
to ask Bill James, the guru I guess?
Sabermetrics is the mathematical study of baseball.
For a primer on some of the best work being done in the field:
http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/new-and-great-sabermetric-resources/
http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2010/2/2/1288799/btb-sabermetric-awards-best
"Have faith in the Yankees, my son. Think of the great DiMaggio."
Thank you Brandon!!
OPS is as far as Sabermetrics goes for me, so I really have no clue what everybody’s talking about. I think it just gets to the point where you overcomplicate a very simple thing.
I firmly believe that any man's finest hour, the greatest fulfillment of all that he holds dear, is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle - victorious.
Vince Lombardi
i really dont like to get this indepth with stats.
i love stats and i use them to make arguments all the time but sabermetricts is taking it to far for me, i feel it overlooks how a player really performs on the field, and it takes away from the mental aspect of the game, i like to stick with the traditional stats. however i do like the sabermetric that measures a players range, i think it is the UZR? am i right?
"Now that you taste it, you just want to keep doing it again." - A-Rod on Winning the World Series.
by donnybaseball23 on Mar 14, 2010 1:15 PM EDT reply actions
UZR
is Ultimate ZOne Rating
for a players defense
which i believe covers the balls a player gets to and makes plays in his partuclar area
however im not sure if it covers how good the players around him are
ex.
a good SS with bad 2B and 3B may not be as good as an OK SS with great 3B and 2B because the latter cover more range and reduce the risk of the SS not making plays
Society for American Baseball Research
SABR is the Society for American Baseball Research, founded in 1971, and the root of the term sabermetrics
Check out the Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabermetrics
http://www.pinstripealley.com/2010/1/19/1259189/ops+-vs-wrc+-or-the-battle-of-the
Here’s a post where I outlined the benefits of wRC+ compared to the traditional stats. UZR is the widely used defensive stat, but everyone agrees that it’s not a very good stat. There just isn’t really anything better at this point because defense is very hard to quantify.
Thanks everyone
I’ll read all of it after the selection show and get back
Writer for Pinstripe Alley.
"Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth."
"So I close in saying that I may have had a tough break, but I have an awful lot to live for."
Some basic SABR ideas
It’s generally assumed in SABR that there are a lot of things outside both a pitcher and a batter’s control in baseball. For example, you can hit a line drive right at the left fielder and record an out, or you can get completely fooled, knub the bull in front of home plate, and beat out an infield single. So the point is basically to find better, more fair metrics to evaluate players. Some main SABR stats that you should probably know are
OPS – On base percentage plus slugging percentage. This is a pretty basic and good measure of proficiency at the plate.
OPS+ – In SABR, a stat with a + after it indicates that the value has been normalized to 100. So if you have exactly league average OPS, your OPS+ will be 100, and if you are twice as good as league average, your OPS+ will be 200, etc.
FIP – Fielding Independent Pitching. FIP looks only at values that are “directly under a pitcher’s control”, walks, HPB, HR allowed, and K. Because it doesn’t factor in hits that don’t leave the ballpark at all, the quality of the defense behind the pitcher doesn’t matter in regard to FIP.
On a closely related note, throughout a career, a pitcher is expected to give up a .290 BABIP (Batting Average On Balls In Play). Meaning that 29% of all balls in play (not counting home runs), should fall for hits. Anything more than that is considered unlucky for the pitcher, and anything less than that is considered lucky.
However, with FIP, there are career trends as well. Some guys, like Javy Vazquez, consistently under perform their FIP. This is often the product of the types of contact that pitchers induce.
There are also defensive metrics like UZR (mentioned above) but I don’t really put any stock in it. UZR takes approximately three years for the sample size to be large enough, and even when there is that much data, the results still fluctuate wildly.
Combining all of these things are encompassing stats like Win Shares and WAR (Wins Above Replacement), which basically attempt to quantify the precise contribution, in number of wins, for one specific player. For example, saying that A-Rod is worth 5 WAR, is like saying that if A-Rod was replaced in the lineup and at third base by a Cody Ransom level player, the Yankees would have won 5 fewer games.
This sticker is dangerous and inconvenient, but I do love Fig Newtons.
What it all comes down to is money, as it always does.
As a GM (non-Moore/Minaya/Wade division), I would want to know that when I’m shelling out $100mm for a new first baseman, I am getting value for my investment. Also, I would recognize that baseball is all about wins—winning more games than any other team in my division nets me a playoff spot. And, to win games, my team has to score more runs than it allows. It’s that simple. So, what do I need to know about this new first baseman that I’m buying?
As a GM, I’m not playing with Monopoly money. I need to know how good he is compared to his peers both in the free agent market and trade market, as well as what is available in my own farm system. We know well that all players have some combination of tools that they bring to the table and that all of these tools help to prevent or create runs. We’ve all heard the story of how Brett Gardner’s deficiencies on offense are made up by his speed and defense. While it’s great that people can make that observation, but can we be more precise?
It helps to think of runs as currency—how many runs does Gardner’s glove prevent? How many runs does he create with stolen bases? How many runs does he create with his on-base ability? The heart of sabermetrics (and science, really) is the attempt to identify and isolate variables. You can refer to the Fangraphs and BtB guides above for the specific stats that are most used today. What they attempt to do is tell us what they are designed to tell us, and nothing more. Moreover, when we can convert abilities into runs, we can compare apples to apples, so to speak. Runs lead to wins, and wins lead to dollars.
I’ll end with an example—FIP tells us a pitcher’s ability to strike people out, prevent walks, and prevent homeruns. That’s it. Does it paint a complete picture? Absolutely not, but it does isolate some very key skills that help prevent runs. On the flip side, ERA is supposed to be a measure of how good a pitcher is. However, ERA also tells us how good our center fielder is, how small our ball park is, how hard the dirt in front of home plate is, etc. For example, imagine we are playing the Mets and Javy Vasquez is on the mound. Holding ever conceivable variable constant, it should be clear that whether this game is played in Citi Field or Yankee Stadium can very well make a difference when it comes to the final score, thus possibly yielding two different ERAs for Javy. While these two numbers do tell us how well Javy did, some component of his performance is dependent on the ball park. That’s bad.
The exact formula appears below:
Your lucky number (from a fortune cookie) + voodoo – Ouija Board denominator. This number is multiplied by Planck’s constant (look it up). For pitchers, subtract their cap size and mulitply by their salary. If the result is a non-imaginary number, divide by the speed of light. For position players, take extra base hits per mile, and subtract the number of stripes on their uniform.
It’s just that simple.
by designatedquitter on Mar 15, 2010 11:00 AM EDT reply actions
Dude
Don’t even waste your time posting BS like this.
The bs is thinking that UZR and WORP are accurate measures of defense and wins
by designatedquitter on Mar 15, 2010 2:53 PM EDT up reply actions
So make your case that some other statistic is better, then
Tell me that fielding percentage is the best stat or that won/lost record for a pitcher is more important than anything. But don’t make asinine comments that are either meant to irritate people or simply hold on to old ways of thinking for no logical reason whatsover.
My grandfather refuses to buy a computer, arguing that he’s made it this far without one. That’s fine, but it doesn’t mean that handwriting a letter, walking it down to the post office, and waiting three days for the recipient to get it is the best way to communicate with somebody in 2010.
The irony is that I share a similar mindset.
However, instead of sharing you dream of torpedoing modern methods back into the stone age, I am thinking of ways to make UZR and WORP better and more accurate.
Mr. Task has a point.
I don’t actually think sabermetrics is totally worthless. I just become annoyed when someone argues that player A has a WORP of 3.4 and player B has a WORP of 3.1, and therefore is 10% more valuable, or whatever. Using inherently imperfect statistics and then mulitplying or combining them merely multiplies the error.
I also get annoyed when UZR says Mark Teixeira is a below- average (average at best? I don’t care to remember) 1st baseman, when my eyes tell me that his abilties raised the level of play of the entire infield last year, especially compared to Giambi.
Finally, I don’t need sabermetrics to tell me that if Melky Cabrera and Vernon Wells put up practically the same triple crown numbers, and Melky made $450k and Wells $20m, that one of them was a poor investment.
There is insight in sabermetrics, I just think that it gets taken much too far when its adherents try to derive more from its numbers than it can justify.
Peace, ok?
by designatedquitter on Mar 16, 2010 10:46 AM EDT up reply actions
not all sabr stats are created equally...
Some of the stats are flawed, but some are very accurate. Most of the offensive stats are very good, like wRC+, wOBA, and EqA. If you want to know how good a player is offensively, these stats are the ones to look at. AVG, OBP, and SLG are outdated and shouldn’t be used anymore.
I will absolutely agree that the defensive and all-around value stats are very inexact. They are inexact in the way that AVG, OBP, and SLG are inexact, but it took a long time to get something better than those. In time, better defensive and value stats will be found, but in the mean time, UZR and WAR (or WORP) are what we have.
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