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As promised, I'm going to start out by talking about my fundamental statistical baseball beliefs.
First of all, the mainstream media has brainwashed MLB fans into putting much emphasis into statistics such as batting average, RBI's, ERA and all that business. While these stats measure something for us, they aren't very good at telling us how good a player is.
How can we use batting average to measure a player when it ignores he existence of a players ability to walk to get on base? Because of this, we started putting more weight into On-base percentage.
But wait, On-base rates still do not discriminate into how batters get on. Home runs are weighted the same as singles. To solve this problem, many baseball folks started combining On-base rates with slugging and called this new all-encompassing stat OPS (on-base plus slugging).
As I'm sure you might have guessed, there is a flaw here. Slugging is counted in this manner: (the sum of singles x1, doubles x2, triples x3, and HRs x4 all divided by at bats). The problem with this is that we are assuming that a HR is 4 times as valuable as a single, ect.
We can use math to discover the values of each baseball related event. Research has discovered that home runs are worth 1.7 runs on average, triples are worth 1.37, doubles are 1.08, singles are .77, and walks are .62. The weights are then adjusted by 15 percent to scale our rate for wOBA or weighted On-base average to look more like a true On-base percentage. MLB average typically falls in the .320 to .330 range. You can check out Miguel Cabrera's stats for this.
Similarly, I don't like the ERA stat for pitchers because it doesn't account for many factors such as the defense playing behind him, the park he is playing in, weather conditions, ect. FIP, or fielder independent pitching, corrects for a lot of these issues.
As I start posting about more specific things, I will explain what these various "advanced stats," better known as sabermetrics, actually mean. Going forward, I will attempt to make evaluations and predictions this way.
First of all, the mainstream media has brainwashed MLB fans into putting much emphasis into statistics such as batting average, RBI's, ERA and all that business. While these stats measure something for us, they aren't very good at telling us how good a player is.
How can we use batting average to measure a player when it ignores he existence of a players ability to walk to get on base? Because of this, we started putting more weight into On-base percentage.
But wait, On-base rates still do not discriminate into how batters get on. Home runs are weighted the same as singles. To solve this problem, many baseball folks started combining On-base rates with slugging and called this new all-encompassing stat OPS (on-base plus slugging).
As I'm sure you might have guessed, there is a flaw here. Slugging is counted in this manner: (the sum of singles x1, doubles x2, triples x3, and HRs x4 all divided by at bats). The problem with this is that we are assuming that a HR is 4 times as valuable as a single, ect.
We can use math to discover the values of each baseball related event. Research has discovered that home runs are worth 1.7 runs on average, triples are worth 1.37, doubles are 1.08, singles are .77, and walks are .62. The weights are then adjusted by 15 percent to scale our rate for wOBA or weighted On-base average to look more like a true On-base percentage. MLB average typically falls in the .320 to .330 range. You can check out Miguel Cabrera's stats for this.
Similarly, I don't like the ERA stat for pitchers because it doesn't account for many factors such as the defense playing behind him, the park he is playing in, weather conditions, ect. FIP, or fielder independent pitching, corrects for a lot of these issues.
As I start posting about more specific things, I will explain what these various "advanced stats," better known as sabermetrics, actually mean. Going forward, I will attempt to make evaluations and predictions this way.
