Baseball fans are strange types. We will follow a team loyally through decades, or even a century for Chicago Cubs fans, or misery and losing seasons. We are all convinced that we have a better view of a close play at home plate from 400 feet away in the bleachers than the umpire standing three feet from the action. We have rituals to bring success, wear our team pride everywhere we go, and will still argue whether Fred Merkle touched second base on September 23, 1908.
He did. Deal with it, haters!
A point of interest. "Merkle's Boner" came in a game against the Chicago Cubs. Those Cubs would go on to win the National League pennant and the World Series. A feat they only took 108 years to repeat. But this brings up my point. Along with our custom jerseys, rally caps and knowledge of baseball lore, baseball fans are in love with math. Baseball games are athletic contests on the diamond, but in the stands, the fans are conduction a graduate workshop in probability and statistics.
We track every possible stat you can imagine. It's not enough to know that Brandon Crawford's batting average (BA) is .277 (the number of hits divided by official at-bats), no we need to know that his on-base percentage (OBP) (Hits+base on balls+hit by pitch)/(At-bats+base on balls+hit by pitch+sacrifice flies) is .340. Oh, need more? We need to know his power. That leads to the slugging percentage (SLG) which counts total bases. (1 [single] + 2 [double] + 3 [triple] + 4 [home run])/At-bats. Crawford's SLG is currently .404. Finally, the basic stats include RISP (Runners In Scoring Position) which is just the player's batting average when there are runners at second or third base. It sounds strange, but some players will hit much better or far worse when there are runners close to scoring.
Confused yet? We haven't even started yet! Because baseball added a new stat, on-base + slugging percentages (OPS) Brandon is at .744 these days. But there's a problem. Baseball fields are all different. The outfield walls can be at different distances from home plate and have different heights. The Rockies' ballpark is at 5,200 feet, they even have a line of purple seats designating one mile above sea level. Meanwhile, the Giants play at sea level in a park that is frequently cold, windy and foggy.
So baseball invented OPS+. [(OPS/league OPS, adjusted for park factors) x 100]. This adjusts for the player's league average and ballparks he plays in. We also count more prosaic things like, oh, home runs and runs batted in.
It's no better for fielders on defense. Luckily for them, there's really only one stat anyone cares about: Fielding percentage (Fld%). This is (Putouts + assists)/(putouts + assists + errors). A putout is when the fielder makes an out by catching the ball on the fly, tagging the runner out, any kind of out. An assist is awarded to any player who touches the ball in a play that results in an out. So if Brandon Crawford fields a sharp grounder and flips it Joe Panik covering 2nd base for an out, Crawford gets an assist, Panik the putout. Making an error (defined as muffing a play that should be made with ordinary efforts, like overthrowing a ball or dropping an easy fly ball, is counted as an error. Crawford is very good at his job, with a career Fld% of .976.
Pitchers don't escape the madness. Here we look at the Earned Run Average (ERA). Here, lower is better. You calculate ERA pretty simply. (earned runs/innings pitched) x 9. An earned run is a run scored without the aid of errors by the team in the field (i.e., by hits, walks, and outs that advance baserunners). So if Madison Bumgarner pitches 7 innings an allows 2 runs, his ERA for that game is 2.57. Great pitchers keep their ERA below three. As with batters, there is a more complex ERA+ that accounts for league and ballparks.
Oddly, even though ERA measures the most important job of the pitcher, keeping the other team from scoring, fans have become enamored of another stat: WHIP (Walks + Hits per Inning Pitched) This is simply calculated by adding the total number of hits and walks allowed by a pitcher and dividing by the number of innings pitched.
Finally, we have WAR, Wins Above Replacement. WAR is a calculated by . . . let me see here, well I think it goes . . . you know what? No human knows how to calculate WAR. I'd need a few hours and a big white board to even start. Screw it. High is good.
So if you happen to see a baseball game and wonder why the fans are so quiet, now you know. We're working on our graphing calculators to update stats.
For lots of crazy baseball statistics fun, I recommend
www.baseball-reference.com
