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CONTRASTS: Because GMs now know better, the guy on the left (Youkilis) is starting for the Red Sox while the guy on the right (Hillenbrand) is riding the pine in Los Angeles. |
It’s become the creationism v. evolution argument of baseball. There are those who prefer the old school approach – looking at a guy’s raw skill along with things like “grit,” “hustle” and determination – and those who prefer a numbers-based approach, which attempts to assign a different kind of value to things that happen on a baseball field. The latter practice is commonly called “sabermetrics,” after the Society for American Baseball Research (or SABR,) and if sports columns, books, talk radio, television, and interpersonal conversations are to be believed, even now, 30 years after its unofficial “founding,” it remains one of the most misunderstood concepts in sports. Fortunately, unlike creationism and evolution, there are some pretty well-defined answers to this. So here, in short, is a quick explanation some of the common misconceptions about what sabermetrics are all about.
Myth #1: These stats are a “new” concept
Not really. Back in 1977, Bill James, a security guard with a math jones, studied the numbers and compiled the information in the book The Bill James Baseball Abstract. Given the audience James found almost immediately, it’s safe to assume he wasn't the only one thinking of it at the time. As James's research proved, this information was always out there; it was just a matter of looking in the right places. Events that “don't show up in the box scores” actually do, for the most part (except for defensive plays; more on that in a second). To take on-base percentage as an example, a hitter's ability to avoid making an out has always been something measurable — people simply weren't really measuring or placing value on it.
Myth #2: These stats are redundant
It's a common tenet of the SABR-haters: “hey, I love stats, but back in my day, we used a little thing called batting average and runs batted in!” But neither of those statistics really paint a full picture of a player's actual value.
Batting average is, ultimately, a hollow stat. Simplify it this way: the worst thing a batter can do is get an out. Batting average may account for each time a batter gets a hit, but it doesn’t measure how well he avoids outs. It’s a key difference over the course of a season. While there isn't a huge difference in terms of number of hits between a .300 hitter and a .260 hitter, there is a bigger difference between the number of times reached base by a batter with .320 on-base percentage and a guy with a .360 on-base percentage. Slugging percentage, meanwhile, measures total bases per at-bat. If a guy just comes up and hits singles every time, he’ll have some value to your team, but much less than a guy who mixes in frequent doubles and home runs. Use the smell test: would you rather have Mark Loretta (.285 batting average with a .361 slugging percentage last year) or Dan Uggla (.282, .480)? You’d take Uggla every time. Obviously.
