Buchholz and the Long Ball
Coming in to 2011, we heard from every pundit with a sabermetric calculator that Clay Buchholz would experience some significant…
Category: Ian Kinsler
TEX 5, BOS 1: Trade bait
If Brady Penny is going to be traded then this outing didn't help the Boston Red Sox front office.
American League West Preview…And the rest of the remaining divisions too.
The Angels do not get on base much, and they haven't hit for all that much power of late. I am a stat-guy. So I believe that an offense needs to do these things to score enough runs. There is only so much that can happen as a result of "hit and runs" and taking the extra base. Now, taking the extra base is great, and often overlooked--as is baserunning in general. But a team must get on base enough, in order to score enough.
The Abreu acquisition was great. For that amount of money, the team put aside their philosophy of having only players who can play defense, and sacrificed "it" for a little offense. There is no risk in signing Abreu, and he should still hit for average, get on base, and flash enough power to make him a quality all-around player.
Fire Brand explains Win Values
Baseball has forever been a game of statistics and over the past few decades, sabermetrics have taken this passion way beyond batting average and on-base percentage. Growing up, my family always said all you needed to do to be successful was to "build a better mouse-trap," meaning, if you can find a way to improve on existing information, to make something more efficient, you'll find success follows. Statistics in baseball are the new mouse-trap; for the most part, the numbers being used haven't changed for 100 years, they are just being manipulated in a way to provide a better benchmark to evaluate a player's value and/or worth. The end goal never changes: a better mouse-trap still kills the mouse in the end, and a better statistic still just evaluates a player, but the means or accuracy of doing so makes it special.
The problem with the evolution of statistics in baseball has been the public acceptance of them. I'd be just as willing to bet that Woodrow Wilson and his friends talked about Babe Ruth's batting average in 1915 as I would bet that Barack Obama won't discuss the VORP of David Ortiz in 2009. Some statistics resonate through the general public and become part of the casual fan's conversation, and some don't. The "stickiness" of a stat depends on how complicated it is to understand, calculate, or relate to something the average fan can appreciate.
The numbers being thrown around by stat heads these days are often hard to grasp. Even an easy concept, such as Batting Average on Ball In Play, can be misunderstood and misused, as I demonstrated during my fourth outfielder series. Okay, so we all agree that batting average is a horrible statistic to base the value of a player on, but what metric can we all agree on that makes sense? Fortunately for us, Dave Cameron over at FanGraphs, has put together an eight part series on Win Values.