The baseball season for most is drawing to a close. The leaves change colors, people migrate inside their homes, and sporting events take place in some of the world's most ugly architectural feats, commonly known as arenas. The rich smell of grass and the intoxicating aroma of leather are replaced by buzzing overhead lights and filtered air inside a giant square building. Forgive me for being a bit brash, but winter is hell for baseball players.
The gentle breeze on your back in the outfield is replaced by shrieking whistles and blaring buzzers in the sports of basketball, football and hockey. The only thing left for a baseball player to do is hit the weight room and decipher his stats from the season. This means no fielding grounders or taking BP, unless you happen to luxuriate yourself in the warmth of the sun year-round in the southern states.
I assume that you have the weight training portion of your off season program taken care of, but if not, make sure to check out my article on strength training. This leaves us with deciphering your baseball stats to kill the time until ball starts up again in the spring.
The Basics: Your Raw Stats
Assuming you had a decent stat keeper, or at least an accurate stat book, you probably have all the raw stats at your fingertips. This may take some time to accumulate, but is ultimately worth it in the end in terms of evaluating your performance over the past season. Lets go over the abbreviations commonly found in stat books, and which stats to take from the book.
Offense:
This is by no means a list of every single stat possible, but rather a look at the important statistics which can help measure a player's ability and worth (feel free to use this stuff in your fantasy leagues).
Plate Appearances = Number of times you have had an at-bat
This is simply your at bats + walks + Hit By Pitcher + Sacrifice Hits + Sac Flies + Number of times reached by Defensive Interference.
Hits = Number of times reaching base successively by putting the ball in play
This is another straightforward stat; don't forget to subtract errors and fielder's choice.
- 1B = Single
- 2B = Double
- 3B = Triple
- HR = Home Run
- BB = Bases on Balls (walks)
- HBP = Hit By Pitcher
- SO or K = Strikeout
- SF = Sacrifice Fly
- SB = Stolen Base
- CS = Caught Stealing
- GIDP = Ground into Double Play
An important stat, as GIDP's can effectively kill an inning, limiting run scoring potential.
IBB = Intentional Base on Balls (Intentional Walk)
Another important stat, having a large amount of IBB's can determine how feared a hitter is, an example would be Barry Bonds.
Extracting Information From Offensive Statistics
Batting Average:
Everybody knows about this stat. Simply divide the number of hits by the number of at-bats. This is one of the cruder stats; as it does not take into account extra base hits or walks. While certainly impressive if someone has a .350+ average, it is not the end all be all of baseball statistics. The stat is overrated.
On-Base Percentage:
One of the best stats to be measured by. OBP simply means the percentage of the time that you do NOT make an out (reach base).
To Calculate OBP:
(Hits + Walks + Hit-By-Pitch) divided by (At Bats + Walks + Hit-By-Pitch + Sac Flys). The baseline for a great OBP is .400, although anything above the ML average certainly is good (.353).
Slugging Percentage:
Another great statistic to be measured by. SLG% means how many total bases touched per at-bat.
To Calculate SLG:
Number of (Singles + [2 x Doubles] + [3 x Triples] + [4 x Home Runs]) divided by At Bats.
Stolen Base Percentage:
Merely seeing how many stolen bases a player has does not tell us he is a great base stealer. We need to see his success rate to be sure he does not cause more outs than necessary, because the stolen bases is a very risky move, and usually you need to be successful at stealing bases 80% of the time for it to be beneficial. To calculate Stolen Base Percentage: Number of Successful Stolen Bases (divided by) Number of Stolen Base Attempts
Base On Balls Percentage:
A great stat for measuring a player's batting "eye" or how respected a hitter is by pitchers. As I have said in my batting article, walks are paramount to success in baseball. If you can get a decent amount of walks, you can contribute to wearing down the pitcher's arm and scoring runs.
To Calculate:
Number of Total Walks (divided by) Number of Plate Appearances.
Walks/Strikeout Ratio:
This is a great measure of plate discipline. Generally, if a player has more walks than strikeouts, he has a good eye, and has great knowledge of the strike zone.
This is simply walks divided by strikeouts.
On-Base + Slugging (OPS):
ESPN has started showing OPS during broadcasts, and there is a good reason for it. OPS can tell you about two important qualities in one stat: the ability to reach base, and to hit for power. While some think OBP is more important and therefore should be weighted, it still does a good job of evaluating a player. The gold standard in the major leagues is an OPS of 1.000.
To Calculate:
OBP + SLG.
Drawing Conclusions
Now that we have some metrics to measure your success on offense, we can draw conclusions about your ability during the season. The below are a few common statistical situations that are often found in minor and major league players.
Low Walk/Strikeout Ratio, With Some Power Numbers (HR, RBI, SLG%):
This is prevalent in almost all leagues and levels of play in baseball. Usually this is a player who is designated as a "free swinger". He usually strikes out a lot, has poor plate discipline, but can wallop the ball. This guy will amaze you with power, but he whiffs so much that he can effectively kill an inning, and does not affect the pitcher's cautiousness or pitch count.
An example of this would be Dallas McPherson in triple-A this year. He had 20 home runs, but also struck out an astonishing 95 times in 67 games, with only 23 walks.
High OBP/High SLG/Slightly Low AVG/High BB/K Ratio:
This is the perfect player for creating runs. He gets on base a lot (OBP), has great plate discipline (BB/K ratio), and hits for power (SLG). He minimizes outs by being selective at the plate, and effectively wears down a pitcher's arm.
A perfect example of this would be Nick Swisher of the Oakland A's triple-A affiliate. Nick had an excellent OBP (.402), a pretty decent SLG (.537), a nice amount of HR (29), an excellent BB/K ratio (103/109, while he had more k's than walks, he played in over 100 games, and anytime you can get 100 walks, that is incredible). The only "bad" thing was that his batting average was only .265. But as I mentioned previously in this article, batting average is overrated and does not really correlate to anything useful.
These are two examples of certain "types" of players. Hopefully I have introduced you to organizing and analyzing your stats to effectively illustrate your strengths and weaknesses. This is hardly new stuff, but I find that high school players often need a refresher course on how to interpret their stats.
If you are still having trouble deciphering your stats, I would gladly go over your stats for you and give you an analysis. To contact me, you can e-mail me at brevare@yahoo.com or you can send me a private message at the athletes.com forums, where my name is "Silent_Impact".
Check back soon for part 2 of this article, where we will go over pitching stats, and how to analyze them to guide your baseball training.
brevare@yahoo.com
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