Sabermetrics and Soda

I promised baseball for the 5 people who read this blog so baseball it will be, at first.

There is a statistical tracking club for baseball called SABR (Society for American Baseball Research) which analyzes baseball and has come up with categories of statistics called SABERMETRICS over the past couple of decades.

While I am someone who appreciates baseball for its statistical compilations this club has come up with really stupid stat categories yet leaves out a couple very, very important ones; ones which I believe should be a couple of the most important measures of a players offensive importance.

Wins Above Replacement, or WAR, is the most asinine of these stats. 

Here is the definition of WAR : WAR attempts to measure a player's value - expressed in wins - over that which would have been contributed by a fictional "replacement-level player" (essentially a AAA-quality player who can be readily acquired by a team at any time for the league's minimum salary) in the same amount of playing time.

The framework is simple: start with a player's Runs Above Average in various categories - batting, baserunning, double play avoidance, and fielding (plus a position adjustment) on the position-player side, and runs allowed below the league average (adjusting for park, opponents, leverage, and defense) for pitchers. Then figure out how far, in runs, the average player would have been from the replacement level in the player's playing time, and add that to their RAA. The result is Runs Above Replacement, which can be converted to Wins Above Replacement by using a runs-to-wins conversion factor (usually 10 runs = 1 win).

Huh? Total nonsense. 

There are so many variables which are unaccounted in some of these areas that it makes this a complete fantasy. Yet, there are people who swear by this and this statistic, alone, was at the center of a major debate in the 2012 AL MVP race between Miguel Cabrera and Mike Trout.

Trout, who strikes out at least 150 times a year still gets called the greatest player in the game. No one can be called one of the greatest players in the game with that many strikeouts, I’m sorry to say. 

So WAR is dumb.

Here is the other one that drives me nuts…OPS. This one is On Base Percentage plus Slugging Percentage. They add two stats together and come up with this one.

On Base Percentage IS one of the more valuable measures of a players offensive worth. People need to be on base in order for a team to score runs. A homerun is measured as a time on base so it’s a great tool to use to measure an offensive ability. It doesn’t tell anyone WHEN a player gets on base, but even if a team is trailing by a large margin, it still needs players on base in order to mount any sort of a comeback.

Slugging Percentage has always been pretty much of a waste of a stat. Its totals bases divided by times at bat. So if a player is up one time and hits a homerun, that is 4 total bases (a triple would be 3, double, 2, single 1.) The highest someone could manage to get is 4.000. It’s a measure of a power hitter, more than anything else, but if you read a players statistical line and see that they have hit 30 or 40 homeruns a year that is already obvious. 

So since we have those two stats already, and they are telling two different stories, the stat of OPS is a complete waste of time. It doesn’t tell the whole story about a player anyway. If someone has an OPS of .800, what is the stat that is the highest contributor to that total number? If I am a GM and I want a power hitter, I want the Slugging Percentage (although I’m just going to look at the amount of extra base hits he has anyway) and if I want to know if the player gets on base I want to know the On Base Percentage.

There used to be a stat called Game Winning RBI. Now, that sounded like a good one but its now no longer officially kept. Well, they figured it out wrong and that's why it failed. If someone drove in a run to make it 1-0 and the team held the lead all game long but won 10-9, the guy who drove in that very first run got credit for the GWRBI. This scenario is a bit tricky since there is no lead change, but really the guy who drove in the 10^th run is the guy who should have received credit for the GWRBI.

Now, the stats that SHOULD be officially tracked are Game Tying RBIS and Go Ahead RBIS. These are rubs driven in, at any point in any game, which obviously either tie up a game or give a team a lead. These are measures of REAL clutch hitters.

A player could get one of each if he were to hit a 2-run homerun with his team trailing by a run and gave them a lead. If a team was down by four and he hit a grandslam that’s still just one game-tying RBI. That is how this stat would be compiled.

The stat of hitting with Runners in Scoring Position is a decent stat but a runner in scoring position means that a runner is either on second and/or third. If a guy hits a solo homerun, or drives in a run from 1^st base he doesn’t get credit for a positive RISP stat. Game Tying and Go Ahead RBIS handle all of that. 

If I was a GM for a major league baseball team I would hire a statistical tracking service to find out who out there drives in the most of those kinds of runs. It’s one thing to have 6 rbis in a game but they all came when the team was losing by 15 runs, or something. Its quite another thing to have a guy drive in one run in a game but that run tied up the game at some point during the game.

So I would find those true clutch hitters and the guys with the highest On Base Percentage and do what I could to get them on my team.

But, no one is ever going to hire me to run a baseball team.

However, I CAN become a member of SABR and officially pitch those two stats. I would have to make a case for it and just don’t have the time. But if one of you five people who have read this are looking for something to do, feel free to take on my cause.

On one of the next tapings of WoW with Marsh & Mike we are going to discuss the fact that the City of Philadelphia just passed a soda tax. Now there is going to be an additional 1.5 cents per ounce charged to each soda purchase, whether its regular soda or even diet soda.

This communist tax is one which is supposed to help keep fat people from staying fat and they are using the children of Philadelphia as an excuse to implement this tax.

The problem with these taxes, as is the case with tobacco taxes, is that revenues only go up for a short period of time, then decrease. Budgets will be made predicting all sorts of windfall revenues from these taxes. Then when the revenue begins to dry up the communist politicians will figure out something else to tax.

Yes, I’m going to continue to use the term communist, because that is only what this is. Deal with it.

I already heard the new communist mayor of Philadelphia say this morning that this is “just the beginning,” with my own ears. 

These people need to be defeated…at every level. Every. Single. Level.

That’s it.

Done.