I really love talking about baseball with my two best friends, who are an economist and a data scientist. And then there's me, who got a C in high school trig.
It's wrong to dismiss batting average entirely. The point of the other stats is to show that having a .300 ba doesn't automatically make you a better hitter than someone batting .270 I take it as batting average isn't as important as we once thought but that doesn't mean it's worthless.
Man, Ben Revere quickly became my favourite Blue Jay when he got traded here. 35 runs scored in 56 games. Yeah, he had no power but he was such an annoying out for pitchers to get. Once he got on 1st heâd be in the pitcherâs head non stop. Dude got a JD and Jose lots of fastballs to hit because of that.
I'd feel like someone with a like .300/.310/.350 slash would be pretty mediocre.
But what do I know I'm a Phillies fan. Big man make ball go boom, make me happy. Even with his barely .200 BA
>But what do I know I'm a Phillies fan
How could you forget Ben Revere? His 2 full seasons in Philly:
2013: .305/.338/.352 giving an OPS of .691 and OPS+ of 93
2014: .306/.325/.361 giving an OPS of .686 and an OPS+ of 92
Great defender and stole bags well. But possibly one of the worst 300 hitters I've seen. Absolutely no pop at all, so no pitcher was afraid to challenge him
He was not strong enough to drive the ball (3 total homeruns in 2.5 seasons in Philly) so pitchers just challenged him every time. He got a lot of bloop and bunt singles and barely ever walked. He walked 13 times in 2014 in 151 games. He led the league in hits that season. His WAR was 1.1
He was fun to watch. He never walked because pitchers would throw right down the middle to him because they knew he wasn't going to hit a home run.
He was a really good defender, yes, but he had a noodle arm. I still loved him as a Twin though.
That OBP isn't good for a .300 hitter either, especially one with speed. Should be .350+. .325 is something a .250 hitter can get without too much trouble if they're threatening enough in other ways.
>Great defender and stole bags well. But possibly one of the worst 300 hitters I've seen. Absolutely no pop at all, so no pitcher was afraid to challenge him
Dude, that's the perfect small ball hitter. I'd take that every fucking time. The problem with current sabermetrics is its inability to properly evaluate players who don't have big bats.
I wouldnât say Revere was âmalignedâ here but he wasnât appreciated too too much.
Which isnât surprising. Baseball fans want big hitters, but Iâve always been a proponent of having a slightly more balanced team- thereâs always use for a fast dude that makes contact.
Good leadoff guy.
Meanwhile Ichiro hit .268/.309/.342 good for a .652 OPS and 83 OPS+ over his final 9 seasons and you'll have people that get offended when you call him a compiler (27% of his career hits came over that span).
Ichiro also didn't join the majors until he was 27, so those last nine seasons started when he was 37. Plus, those last two seasons weren't full seasons. He got nine hits in 17 games.
I mean if you managed to barely walk, and also hit for practically xbh that would be so impressive it would count as "you managed to hit .300 and be bad" but tbf if that slash came with even slightly above average defence at non cOF or 1B hes certainly playable.
Toe is exactly the guy who came to mind when I think of "Man can't hit for power and swings at everything but i want him on my roster" Or at least with his Yankee stat lines
Yeah, but wRC+ is the preeminent measure of offense that we have. So itâs like saying that a carrot is the worst piece of cheese youâve ever had, while in a cheese tasting competition.
You're missing what I intended. wRC+ is focused on the individual at bat. Pierre would turn a single or walk into a double (and sometimes a triple) via the steal which isn't counted in slugging or wRC+. It's not an apt comparison as it discounts speed's impact on a game.
Dee Gordon in his random incredible year with the dodgers went .330/.350/.418, and that was by far the highest slugging he ever had in his career
Only walked 25 times in 650 PA lol
Hot take: Dominance of batting average as opposed to OBP or slugging makes for a generally more enjoyable viewing experience.
.180/.300/.500 is the death of the game.
Thatâs not a hot take. Everyone agrees. Unfortunately itâs just a lot tougher now to dominate with batting average what with all of the 95 MPH sliders.
Not everyone agrees. Iâd rather watch someone control the zone and work deep counts than spray the ball around. Loved watching those mid-2000s Red Sox team that ground pitchers down.
You need to be around during the regular season then. Those posts are full of people fellating themselves with numbers alone and no idea what makes a watchable game.
Well the game has changed. Just because people appreciate the best modern players doesnât mean they donât think more balls in play would be more entertaining.
Some people are just more concerned with what makes their team good than what makes the game more watchable. Crazy, I know.
Iâm sure a lot of NFL fans think that big hits are more entertaining but that doesnât mean they want their players to collect 15 yard unnecessary roughness penalties.
"watchable game"
Fans will buy tickets to go see a 100 game winning team even if they win all those games by walking 9 times a game
They don't give a shit about a team that wins 75 games but gets 14 hits a game.
I don't know, there were many games last season where the White Sox had double digit hits and just a handful of runs and it was definitely not fun or enjoyable.
Soft contact doesnât really come with that slash line anyway- look at Steven Kwan for instance. Dinking one over the first or third baseman often ends in extra bases.
Juan Pierre was a .295 career hitter with an OPS+ of 84. He had almost no power and basically never walked. Now, he provided a lot of value as a baserunner, so I wouldn't so say he was bad overall, but certainly not a great hitter despite having an average of around .300
This is a bit of a straw man; all of the decidedly superior datapoints weâve created that have replaced BA also include hits.
Edit: well, your edit makes my comment seem less relevant, but it also renders your original point about BA moot.
You commented at least 30 minutes after they did.
They don't have an edit asterisk on their comment. You do.
It's impossible for them to have ninja edited in a way that you would have seen their pre-edit comment.
If someone makes a comment at 2 PM, you open the thread at 2:01 and they ninja edit seconds later, and you only reply to the comment half an hour later you would not catch the ninja edit. Itâs absolutely possible.
I donât know what to tell you⌠the original commentâs second sentence was something along the lines of âhits are still a core component of winning baseball games.â Otherwise I would have just pointed out that his comment didnât really make any sense. Hits *are* a core component of advanced metrics, which is exactly why we donât rely on BA for much anymore.
Most critics of BA are saying there are too much noise to simplify judging a player solely by batting average. Even the boomers understood the laws of mean, especially for a batting slump.
A high batting average with good exit velocity, barrel contact and solid launch angles is a good hitter. Good batted ball profile more often than not mean a consistently high BABIP.
Batting average correlates reasonably well to runs scored, but it doesnât correlate nearly as well as OBP or Slg. In fact if you know a team or playerâs OPS then batting average provides exactly zero extra information.
Edit: also this post makes the incorrect conclusion that their made up âBAPPâ stat accounts more 86% of the variation in runs scored and is therefore a better predictor than OPS, which the author claims explains 83% of the variation in runs scored.
âŚwhich is incorrect cuz Ben Clemens showed that OPS in fact accounts for 88.5% of the variation runs scored making it a better measure of the effectiveness of a hitter. The author even linked Clemensâ article and still got this wrong.
[Ben Clemensâ article](https://blogs.fangraphs.com/triple-slash-line-conundrum-voros-mccracken-edition/)
Thatâs not true? It will give you a better understanding of their profile. Are they a contact team? Power team? Balanced? Also AVG is still valuable to know even if you know the OBP because it tells you how often they are getting on base by means of a hit, which is more valuable than a walk.
No, but it does mean that someone hitting .330 is a better hitter than someone hitting .230.
I donât care what OPS says, youâll never convince me different.
Iâll take my chances putting a lineup of Tony Gwynnâs against a lineup of Joey Galloâs.
Thatâs the entire point of the discussion though, that BA alone doesnât give you enough to determine value. If the 230 hitter hits 50 HR theyâre going to create more runs than a 330 hitter slugging .400
Iâd rather watch most 330 hitter over 230 cause most donât hit 50 hr
> I donât care what OPS says, youâll never convince me different. Iâll take my chances putting a lineup of Tony Gwynns (.847 OPS) against a lineup of Joey Gallos (.794 OPS).
Another brilliant take brought to you by the people who still think batting average is the most important stat!
I see this comparison all the time. Why? Who is taking Gallo over Gwynn? Itâs like you guys *know* you donât have any good arguments so you just make up a fake one to argue against.
Right, nobody argues that Gallo is better than Tony Gwynn, we argue that he's better than an empty .280-.290 hitter like, IDK, Harold Castro (.284 career average, .686 career OPS)
Thatâs not always true. Like it or not, someone like Adam Dunn is a better hitter than someone like Ichiro. The numbers saying something you donât like doesnât make them lies.
We already have wrc+, which uses the linear weights that he bases his entire argument on. Weâve known that a single is better than a walk for a long time, and that first base is the most important one. We donât really need the authorâs BAPP or whatever when we already have wRC.
Well, thatâs not strictly true â there is a point where fewer hits is better when youâre sacrificing it to hit for more power (that article mentions when youâre getting about 10% more ISO):
> Looking at this another way, if you are trading batting average for ISO (a typical trade-off) you want to make sure you gain at least 10% more ISO points than AVG points.
I donât know how thatâs the takeaway. Thereâs a lesson here about statistics and drawing conclusions based on highly correlated variables. The point is that we should look at outcomes independently of BA not ones that are because of BA
I think the way I'd summarize this is that OBP and SLG are more predictive than BA, but if you know OBP and BA, an OBP made up of higher BA is better than one that is not.
So you do lose information by focusing only on, say, OBP and throwing out BA, but OBP is still a better predictor if, for some reason, you want to use only one basic statistic.
In any case the advanced hitting metrics (like wRC+) include all of this anyways. They know how to convert batting stats to runs to wins.
> Let me illustrate this concept by rephrasing the question Tom Tango asked of whether a .260/.365/.510 line is better than a .315/.365/.510 line. Letâs frame it as an AVG/BB%/ISO% question. Which is the more productive batter (AVG/BB%/ISO%): a .260/.105/.250 hitter or .315/.050/.195 hitter?
> In this instance, itâs clear that the batter is trading 55 points of batting average, for 55 points of isolated patience (read walk%) and 55 points of isolated slugging. As weâll soon see, this is indeed a very good trade-off that works out to roughly +10 runs per 600 plate appearances. It should be noted that people I hold in very high esteem assumed these two batters were roughly equal due to their OBP+SLG being equivalent, which illustrates how using a double slash (OBP/SLG) line can sometimes lead to (in my estimation) incorrect conclusions.
I'm pretty sure your math is wrong here because OBP - AVG =/= BB%. For your AVG/BB%/ISO examples, .260 AVG with 10.5% BB rate is a .338 OBP, and .315 AVG with 5% BB rate is a .349 OBP. Assuming PA-BB=AB of course.
Granted I'm an old fogey, but "entertaining," "fun to watch," and "athletic" need to be valued a lot more than they are these days.
I get it; I do. The advanced stats optimizations are the objectively most *productive* way to play baseball in aggregate, but fuck me, between the mega-shifts and TTO-uber allez that has taken root, baseball was just a lot more fun to watch in the 80s and 90s.
Even Jomboy came around after watching all the old World Series. A steal or a bunt may statistically be the same as giving away an out, but if you look at the NPB and MLB today, I know which is the more fun brand of baseball to watch.
I think a large amount of people would agree with you that it's much more fun to watch small ball and speedsters and contact hitters. I'm a big analytics person and love everything sabermetrics. At the same time, TTO baseball is more boring to watch and I welcome the new rule changes.
Totally agree. Min/maxing launch angle and exit velo might be the smartest thing from a value standpoint over a 162 game season. However, having I feel like that strategy doesnât payoff against elite pitchers that you are going to see in the playoffs. Being able to get slap singles and change your approach with RISP against elite pitchers is very underrated.
The exact opposite of this is true. Itâs extremely hard to bunch singles together to score off modern bullpens when guys like Edwin Diaz and Emmanuel Clase throw 100+ with unhittable sliders lead to BAA in the .150s so Iâd rather my guys swing hard and hope they run into one for a homer.
You are saying this because you find this approach more aesthetically pleasing, not that itâs a better strategy Hitting HRs is still the better strategy in the postseason.
sure BA is reasonably predictive of run scoring, but OBP is way better and right next to it, so there's no real reason not to use OBP. why pretend walks don't exist? they happen and they get you on base
I skimmed it and saw a couple points I didn't really agree with. one, criticizing OBP for not weighting hits and walks equally. It doesn't, but nor does it claim to - that's wOBA. OBP it is what is it, the percent of the time you get on base. If you subtract OBP from 1, you get out% - the percent of the time you make an out. Not sure why this fact is glossed over but I think that's a huge part of why it's so useful. Plus it's an easy concept to wrap your mind around - if you come to the plate, what's the probability you'll get on base?
Meanwhile, if someone asked me to define BA, I dont even know what I'd say - the percent of the time you get a hit, in chances in which you weren't walked, hit by a pitch, ordered by the manager to try for a bunt and were successful (but not if you failed), or hit a sac fly? And if asked why those are excluded, I would not know what to say. If asked whether the stat would be more accurate if all events were included, I would agree that makes sense.
BA is a weird stat I can't really explain succinctly and that's part of why it isn't great.
I feel like this article headline diverges pretty drastically from the actual content.
The boomers were absolutely not right, their claim that batting average was important as a standalone statistic was pretty soundly refuted by... the article claiming they were right? Batting average is an ingredient in the creation of better stats, it is not all that helpful by itself.
The headline is an inaccurate summary designed to generate clicks but you can tell it's not working because most of the comments in this thread clearly only read the title anyway
The "thesis" is quite a straw man. It seems to create this by confusing the distinction, maybe even intentionally, of AVG and hits. *No one* will argue that hits aren't important.
It's also a bit ironic that the author focuses on criticism that AVG only seems useless in part because it's generally used as part of a triple slash line, then goes on to champion AVG *as part of a different triple slash line*. Never is AVG actually really evaluated on its own, only in the context of other stats OBP and SLG, and in triple slash lines.
If you remove the click baity headline/thesis it's interesting.
A single is only marginally more valuable than a walk, and much less valuable than an XBH. BA is much better than just taking a random guess, but it is essentially meaningless once you have OBP and slugging. Ben Clemens of FanGraphs describes this well here: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/instagraphs/the-triple-slash-line-conundrum-by-era/
Basically BA is important only in the absence of better stats.
That's the entire issue with this. He's just trying to invent new metrics with a dumb title, even though metrics do take BA into account.
OPS is a simple one for determining how much damage a guy is really doing....and it includes BA. So all he's complaining about is that we don't use the phrase Batting Average.
It feels like OBP and ISO (or even OBP and SLG) tells you most of what you're getting out of AVG/BB%/ISO.
Singles and walks just aren't that different value-wise and that's the main benefit of breaking down OBP into AVG and BB%.
Yeah every 10 points of batting average is worth about 1 additional run over a season, holding OBP and ISO constant.
Separating K% from BABIP when it comes to how one got their batting average is probably more important than separating singles from walks.
The funniest part is just now in the comments of this blog he admitted that by the measure he's using in this post wRC+ is actually the worst one. So clearly something's seriously suspect about this analysis.
â+â is creating the error there because its actively attempting to strip out relevant context to runs produced (park factors). The stat that says âheres what the rockies should have hit if they played in a neutral ballpark is obviously going to struggle to predict how many runs they actually scored playing in coors field.
Youd want to hold ballpark constant to test wrc+
no you donât understand, we canât prioritize stats that are extremely accurate at evaluating past performance *and* predicting future success because the acronyms confuse me and i might not intuitively understand how the math works!
Tbf I can understand why some fans don't want to view stats as if they're math homework. Most aren't going to put in the effort to learn how wRC+ or xWOBA works. AVG, BB%, and ISO on the other hand work as back of the napkin stats and together paint a solid picture of a hitter. Remember, most fans don't spend their spare time looking up advanced stats. That's for front offices and analytical fans - which are over represented in online baseball spaces.
We just need to normalize the second kind of stat as something that people whose whole lives are baseball have figured out, and if the method is good enough for them, the result is good enough for you.
Just responding to what Iâm seeing in the thread. A high average is obviously almost always very good, the whole point is that hitting for a high average isnât the only way to be a good offensive player, finding undervalued players is what sabermetrics are all about.
Am I the only one that feels ISO is an underutilized statistic? Granted, Iâm sure the big brains upstairs know all about itâŚhowever I feel it should be talked about more, and normalized in baseball banter.
I think it should be utilized more than SLG is at the moment, just because I think that ISO actually gives people an actual statistical power output that they think SLG gives them.
Apart from the statistical measurements, watching people walking is boring as fuck. We want to watch hitters, ya know, HIT THE BALL. More hits is a higher average and therefore more entertaining.
So batting average may or may not be important sabermetrically, but itâs important as entertainment, which in the end is what baseball is all about.
Perhaps to a point, but its failure to fully depict offensive ability is glaring. For example, George Sisler and Lou Gehrig have identical career AVG (all the way out to four decimal places) but thereâs no doubt who the better hitter is. The same goes for pitchers and ERA. Yes, good pitchers often have good ERAs but that doesnât mean that ERA is the best way to evaluate a pitcherâs performance.
I think people are getting hung up on the title. And to be fair, I don't think this article really does much to argue that OBP and SLG aren't better predictors of run-scoring than AVG. Folks, OBP and SLG are still more predictive.
However, it does pose a really interesting statistical case for why AVG was "doomed" from the start of these analyses and can still be a solid part of a different stat-line.
/u/elibenporat you made a really interesting case about the collinearity between AVG, OBP, and SLG. Like, yeah -- it's impossible for AVG to outperform either of those metrics because the other two *contain* AVG plus some other bits of data! Any time you add variables to a regression, r-squared improves. Even if OBP predicts runs better, AVG is the main driver of OBP. Clearly AVG is important.
With that, I personally don't think we should care. Like, if "AVG + a little bit of information" is better correlated to runs than just plain AVG, why shouldn't we use it instead?
However, I really like your triple-slash of AVG/BB%/ISO, though, which is the meat of the argument to my mind. I think it gives a really nice illustration of the type of hitter someone is, and doesn't have the issues illustrated by Tom Tango (where changing one number affects the underlying calculations of the other two). That "BAPP" and OBP are essentially interchangeable for run-prediction makes sense to me, since it's all the same components.
Good article, worth the read.
It is worth the read, but I feel like there's a conflation between *hits* and *batting average* in the article when they really aren't the same thing. Batting average isn't contained in OBP, hits are. Same with slugging.
And it's true that batting average on it's own isn't a great predictor of runs, and the author doesn't even attempt to suggest otherwise. But there's no possible way to come up with any reasonable runs predictor that doesn't include hits, for pretty obvious reasons. That doesn't mean batting average is important, it means hits are important.
Am I the only one who doesnât mind the modern game or TTO? Iâve been watching for almost 2 decades now and Iâve never felt my enjoyment from watching the game wane over that time. Itâs still as fun for me to watch today as it was 15 years ago.
people oftentimes donât actually like baseball, they like what baseball used to represent to them when they were younger, so now they go on baseball subreddits and watch a majority of the MLB season to complain about how âboringâ the game is
this may be the dumbest thing posted on this sub ever.
Yeah no baseball FO has looked into whether batting average was important or not, they totally don't pay analysts thousands of dollars to figure this stuff out. Some random dude on reddit however, has figured out that batting average correlates better to scoring runs by making up some fake ass stat. **Except oh wait, even his own article says otherwise with AVG correlating the second least to creating R/600PA!**
read some actual work in the subject than just making shit up to fit your own preconcieved notions of what "good baseball" is.
I guess there's 2 related but separate questions: does AVG show you how much a players ABs contributed to wins in a season, and does AVG do enough to show how good a player actually is?
IIRC one of the main criticisms of AVG is that it's particularly vulnerable to variability in good/bad fortune a hitter faces from year to year. Hitters can get an extra 10 bloop singles, or they could line out hard 10 times and look like a completely different guy at the end of the year. Advanced metrics do a good job of cutting through a lot of that.
It's the difference between a stat being reflective and being predictive. If you're a FO making decisions based on a player's AVG you'll probably do worse than a FO looking at hard contact rate
Virtually no 'classic' stats are meaningless. They just don't always tell you what some people claim they did.
Batting average tells you something. It just doesn't tell you who is the better hitter.
(Except for pitching Wins. They tell you practically nothing. They tell who was the pitcher of record credited with the Win. That is all.)
I had to stop when I got to the part that said OBP = AVG + BB%.
No. No it does not. AVG has a different denominator (AB) than OBP/SLG (PA).
If all you have is AVG, then yes, it's an OK indicator of a player's skill. But if you have either of the other two, AVG is mostly irrelevant.
BILLY: Okay, here's who we want. Number one: Jeremy's big brother, Jason.
BARRY: Oh, God. Billy, that's trouble.
ROCCO: Billy, look, if Iâyeah. Billy, if I may, he's had
his successes on the fieldâ
BILLY: His batting average is all we're looking at now. And Jason gets an awful lot of hits, which is why he costs 4.1 million.
GRADY: Jeez, Billyâ
BILLY: Number two: Ichiro Suzuki.
KEOUGH: Oh, no.
ARTIE: Not a good idea.
BISHOP: "Young Man" Suzuki?
BILLY: Why is that?
BISHOP: The NPB is so excited about his prospects, they're willing to extend his contract to keep him.
BILLY: Exactly.
GRADY: Ten years from now, Suzuki, big name. Will've been in big games. August, we're lucky if he's gonna have a slugging percentage that's twice his weight.
BILLY: Grady.
GRADY We'll be lucky to get 250 total bases out of him. Why do you like him?
[BILLY points at PETE.]
PETE: Because he hits for average.
HOPKINS: What is this?
BARRY: What are we doing?
BILLY: Okay, number three: Joe Mauer.
ALL: Who?
MAN 2: Mauer?
BILLY: Exactly. He sounds like an Oakland A already. Yes, he's had a little problem withâ
HOPKINS: Little problem? He can't throw. Elizabethton wants to cut him. No one wants to pick him up.
BILLY: That's good for us. He's cheap.
GRADY:
Let me get this straight. You're gonna get an 18-year-old guy
that's been released by a single Appalachian League team because he's got
a 32% caught stealing rate because he can't throw.
BILLY: He can't throw and he can't field. But what can he do?
HOPKINS: Oh, boy.
BILLY: Guys, check your reports or I'm gonna point at Pete.
ALL: He hits for average.
BILLY: He hits for average.
ROCCO: So he singles a lot.
BILLY: He hits for a high batting average, Rocco. Do I care
if it's a single or a triple? Pete?
PETE: You do not.
BILLY: I do not.
I posted a bunch of correlations between season stats and playoff win percentage to show that itâs a crapshoot, and I got multiple comments basically saying âyeah but have you considered that the Astros win a bunch so all of this is wrong.â Debates like these will go on for the rest of our lives.
Pretty good article with a solid conclusion.
It makes me laugh when people dismiss something for being outdated and then it turns out to actually matter. Maybe the fact BA endured for over a century is because it's most representative stat?
It being the most representative stat isn't the conclusion.
It's literally the opposite of the conclusion lol. It's not the best metric by any means, but it's also not worthless.
Yeah but focusing solely on it is uh, not a recipe for success unless you have the speed of like the 2015 Royals. Thank you Frank Menechino đđ
Still too soon
Blogger discovers concept of wOBA, more at 11
I will never understand how OPS is more popular than wOBA.
Probably because you can explain where the OPS comes from without using words like âlinear weightsâ and ârun expectancy matrixâ
You can *feel* all the non stats nerds eyes glazing over.
Hi, itâs me, with glossy eyes.
I really love talking about baseball with my two best friends, who are an economist and a data scientist. And then there's me, who got a C in high school trig.
Because it's easy to calculate from box score stats. wOBA is more complicated, and in 90+% of situations it gives the same answer as OPS in anyway.
there was about 20 years of OPS discussions before wOBA started making waves.
Sure, but those 20 years had âlinear weightsâ precursors to wOBA floating around too. Heck, OPS was intentionally a spinoff of them
It's wrong to dismiss batting average entirely. The point of the other stats is to show that having a .300 ba doesn't automatically make you a better hitter than someone batting .270 I take it as batting average isn't as important as we once thought but that doesn't mean it's worthless.
BA isn't everything. But it's pretty hard to be bad if you hit .300
It's impossible to be bad a hitter if you have an OPS of .800+.
1999 Dante Bichette has entered the chat
Hah, I could have said OPS+ or wRC+ to account for steroid or juiced ball years but I didn't want to be called a nerd.
Wow i just checked his stats in 1999. He had a .895 OPS but just a 103 OPS+. That's just crazy
Pre-humidor Coors Field was a hell of a drug
ben revere has entered the chat
Any relation to Paul?
Paul Revere: "The Red Sox are coming, the Red Sox are coming"
Gandhi has ADD
Man, Ben Revere quickly became my favourite Blue Jay when he got traded here. 35 runs scored in 56 games. Yeah, he had no power but he was such an annoying out for pitchers to get. Once he got on 1st heâd be in the pitcherâs head non stop. Dude got a JD and Jose lots of fastballs to hit because of that.
>Dude got a JD He got a law degree?
I'd feel like someone with a like .300/.310/.350 slash would be pretty mediocre. But what do I know I'm a Phillies fan. Big man make ball go boom, make me happy. Even with his barely .200 BA
>But what do I know I'm a Phillies fan How could you forget Ben Revere? His 2 full seasons in Philly: 2013: .305/.338/.352 giving an OPS of .691 and OPS+ of 93 2014: .306/.325/.361 giving an OPS of .686 and an OPS+ of 92 Great defender and stole bags well. But possibly one of the worst 300 hitters I've seen. Absolutely no pop at all, so no pitcher was afraid to challenge him
He was pretty much the model for the slash line. At least he was fast.
For a guy who could get a fair amount of triples, it's funny how much of a struggle getting to just 20 doubles was for him.
"Why stop at second, when you can get to third?" - overheard on prom night
Do you mean to tell me that a guy with no slugging power scored slightly less than average on a stat that is 50% slugging?
He was not strong enough to drive the ball (3 total homeruns in 2.5 seasons in Philly) so pitchers just challenged him every time. He got a lot of bloop and bunt singles and barely ever walked. He walked 13 times in 2014 in 151 games. He led the league in hits that season. His WAR was 1.1
That is so weird. I love it.
He was fun to watch. He never walked because pitchers would throw right down the middle to him because they knew he wasn't going to hit a home run. He was a really good defender, yes, but he had a noodle arm. I still loved him as a Twin though.
Revere was ***JACKED*** he just didn't have a swing that generated power.
Those last three stats are something else
That OBP isn't good for a .300 hitter either, especially one with speed. Should be .350+. .325 is something a .250 hitter can get without too much trouble if they're threatening enough in other ways.
>Great defender and stole bags well. But possibly one of the worst 300 hitters I've seen. Absolutely no pop at all, so no pitcher was afraid to challenge him Dude, that's the perfect small ball hitter. I'd take that every fucking time. The problem with current sabermetrics is its inability to properly evaluate players who don't have big bats.
I think the perfect small ball hitter would walk more then revere who never saw a pitch he didnât wanna hit
I assume he got a lot more pitches in the zone with the lack of power threat
I wouldnât say Revere was âmalignedâ here but he wasnât appreciated too too much. Which isnât surprising. Baseball fans want big hitters, but Iâve always been a proponent of having a slightly more balanced team- thereâs always use for a fast dude that makes contact. Good leadoff guy.
Pretty mid lead off guy, tbh. Low OBP
Meanwhile Ichiro hit .268/.309/.342 good for a .652 OPS and 83 OPS+ over his final 9 seasons and you'll have people that get offended when you call him a compiler (27% of his career hits came over that span).
Ichiro also didn't join the majors until he was 27, so those last nine seasons started when he was 37. Plus, those last two seasons weren't full seasons. He got nine hits in 17 games.
people love contact hitters, even if they sucked
Great defender but had a noodle arm. He was the kind of bad player that you liked for some reason, in the moment at least.
Starlin Castroâs rookie year he hit .300/.347/.408 for a wRC+ of⌠99.
I mean if you managed to barely walk, and also hit for practically xbh that would be so impressive it would count as "you managed to hit .300 and be bad" but tbf if that slash came with even slightly above average defence at non cOF or 1B hes certainly playable.
You should look up Juan Pierre and Ronald Torreyes. Pierre had a .295 career batting average and career 86 wRC+.
Toe is exactly the guy who came to mind when I think of "Man can't hit for power and swings at everything but i want him on my roster" Or at least with his Yankee stat lines
Toe used to legit throw the bat out of his hands at the ball and hit a single up the middle
Juan Pierre, Ichiro and Luis Castillo were some of my immediate gets on MVP BASEBALL 2004. I certainly had a type
bunt singles were pretty easy in MVP baseball
Stealing second was like guaranteed too.
and was still a pretty good player. Not an MVP but pulled his weight
Because wRC+ is more weighted to slugging and Pierre's game was in speed. It's like saying that a carrot is the worst piece of cheese you've ever had.
Yeah, but wRC+ is the preeminent measure of offense that we have. So itâs like saying that a carrot is the worst piece of cheese youâve ever had, while in a cheese tasting competition.
You're missing what I intended. wRC+ is focused on the individual at bat. Pierre would turn a single or walk into a double (and sometimes a triple) via the steal which isn't counted in slugging or wRC+. It's not an apt comparison as it discounts speed's impact on a game.
My grandpa used to say that all the time.
Dee Gordon in his random incredible year with the dodgers went .330/.350/.418, and that was by far the highest slugging he ever had in his career Only walked 25 times in 650 PA lol
Harold Castro, 2019: .291/.305/.384/.689 OPS+ of 81. -1.0 bWAR
Hot take: Dominance of batting average as opposed to OBP or slugging makes for a generally more enjoyable viewing experience. .180/.300/.500 is the death of the game.
Thatâs not a hot take. Everyone agrees. Unfortunately itâs just a lot tougher now to dominate with batting average what with all of the 95 MPH sliders.
Not everyone agrees. Iâd rather watch someone control the zone and work deep counts than spray the ball around. Loved watching those mid-2000s Red Sox team that ground pitchers down.
I guess when it comes to âdominance of batting averageâ I had something a little more prolific in mind than spraying the ball around.
You need to be around during the regular season then. Those posts are full of people fellating themselves with numbers alone and no idea what makes a watchable game.
Well the game has changed. Just because people appreciate the best modern players doesnât mean they donât think more balls in play would be more entertaining. Some people are just more concerned with what makes their team good than what makes the game more watchable. Crazy, I know. Iâm sure a lot of NFL fans think that big hits are more entertaining but that doesnât mean they want their players to collect 15 yard unnecessary roughness penalties.
"watchable game" Fans will buy tickets to go see a 100 game winning team even if they win all those games by walking 9 times a game They don't give a shit about a team that wins 75 games but gets 14 hits a game.
I don't know, there were many games last season where the White Sox had double digit hits and just a handful of runs and it was definitely not fun or enjoyable.
Soft contact doesnât really come with that slash line anyway- look at Steven Kwan for instance. Dinking one over the first or third baseman often ends in extra bases.
Iâm the opposite. As someone who goes to 40-50 games a year, I love 300 hitters. Bat on ball sound makes me happy.
Stone cold unplayable for a 1B or corner OF.
Juan Pierre was a .295 career hitter with an OPS+ of 84. He had almost no power and basically never walked. Now, he provided a lot of value as a baserunner, so I wouldn't so say he was bad overall, but certainly not a great hitter despite having an average of around .300
The Tigers released Harold Castro who has always hovered close to a 300 BA while having a 3% walk rate and a SLG under 400.
Juan Pierre, Ben revere, Jean segura level
Indeed. People take a sound principle (BA is less important) too far. Hits are still a core component of advanced metrics
This is a bit of a straw man; all of the decidedly superior datapoints weâve created that have replaced BA also include hits. Edit: well, your edit makes my comment seem less relevant, but it also renders your original point about BA moot.
You commented at least 30 minutes after they did. They don't have an edit asterisk on their comment. You do. It's impossible for them to have ninja edited in a way that you would have seen their pre-edit comment.
If someone makes a comment at 2 PM, you open the thread at 2:01 and they ninja edit seconds later, and you only reply to the comment half an hour later you would not catch the ninja edit. Itâs absolutely possible.
I donât know what to tell you⌠the original commentâs second sentence was something along the lines of âhits are still a core component of winning baseball games.â Otherwise I would have just pointed out that his comment didnât really make any sense. Hits *are* a core component of advanced metrics, which is exactly why we donât rely on BA for much anymore.
Most critics of BA are saying there are too much noise to simplify judging a player solely by batting average. Even the boomers understood the laws of mean, especially for a batting slump. A high batting average with good exit velocity, barrel contact and solid launch angles is a good hitter. Good batted ball profile more often than not mean a consistently high BABIP.
sounds like you're describing a guy with a high slugging percentage. Lol
Batting average correlates reasonably well to runs scored, but it doesnât correlate nearly as well as OBP or Slg. In fact if you know a team or playerâs OPS then batting average provides exactly zero extra information. Edit: also this post makes the incorrect conclusion that their made up âBAPPâ stat accounts more 86% of the variation in runs scored and is therefore a better predictor than OPS, which the author claims explains 83% of the variation in runs scored. âŚwhich is incorrect cuz Ben Clemens showed that OPS in fact accounts for 88.5% of the variation runs scored making it a better measure of the effectiveness of a hitter. The author even linked Clemensâ article and still got this wrong. [Ben Clemensâ article](https://blogs.fangraphs.com/triple-slash-line-conundrum-voros-mccracken-edition/)
To say it gives exactly zero extra information is simply not true haha
In terms of offensive value, if you know OPS, batting average adds no novel information.
Thatâs not true? It will give you a better understanding of their profile. Are they a contact team? Power team? Balanced? Also AVG is still valuable to know even if you know the OBP because it tells you how often they are getting on base by means of a hit, which is more valuable than a walk.
No, but it does mean that someone hitting .330 is a better hitter than someone hitting .230. I donât care what OPS says, youâll never convince me different. Iâll take my chances putting a lineup of Tony Gwynnâs against a lineup of Joey Galloâs.
Ok, but OPS says Gwynn was a much better career hitter than Joey. Is there a good example where OPS doesn't align with your opinion?
Andrew Benintendi: .304 AVG, 122 wRC+ Juan Soto: .242 AVG, 145 wRC+
Thatâs the entire point of the discussion though, that BA alone doesnât give you enough to determine value. If the 230 hitter hits 50 HR theyâre going to create more runs than a 330 hitter slugging .400 Iâd rather watch most 330 hitter over 230 cause most donât hit 50 hr
> I donât care what OPS says, youâll never convince me different. Iâll take my chances putting a lineup of Tony Gwynns (.847 OPS) against a lineup of Joey Gallos (.794 OPS). Another brilliant take brought to you by the people who still think batting average is the most important stat! I see this comparison all the time. Why? Who is taking Gallo over Gwynn? Itâs like you guys *know* you donât have any good arguments so you just make up a fake one to argue against.
This sub sometimes makes me wish FJM was still around with some of the takes people have
Itâs hard for some to let go
Right, nobody argues that Gallo is better than Tony Gwynn, we argue that he's better than an empty .280-.290 hitter like, IDK, Harold Castro (.284 career average, .686 career OPS)
"i don't care what the evidence says, you'll never convince me" congrats you're being dumb
Thatâs not always true. Like it or not, someone like Adam Dunn is a better hitter than someone like Ichiro. The numbers saying something you donât like doesnât make them lies.
Then youâre just choosing to live in ignorance.
Itâs tougher to string together more .300 singles to get as many runs as .230 home run hitters would get
We already have wrc+, which uses the linear weights that he bases his entire argument on. Weâve known that a single is better than a walk for a long time, and that first base is the most important one. We donât really need the authorâs BAPP or whatever when we already have wRC.
Don't need to get into advanced stats to know getting more hits is better than getting fewer hits.
This. It's also how Michael Lewis sort of wraps up the conclusions in his book. The other stuff *helps* make a clearer picture, but BA is still huge
Whoa whoa whoa. Slow down Einstein. Explain that to me again
Well, thatâs not strictly true â there is a point where fewer hits is better when youâre sacrificing it to hit for more power (that article mentions when youâre getting about 10% more ISO): > Looking at this another way, if you are trading batting average for ISO (a typical trade-off) you want to make sure you gain at least 10% more ISO points than AVG points.
(All else being equal) was implied by OP
I donât know how thatâs the takeaway. Thereâs a lesson here about statistics and drawing conclusions based on highly correlated variables. The point is that we should look at outcomes independently of BA not ones that are because of BA
I think the way I'd summarize this is that OBP and SLG are more predictive than BA, but if you know OBP and BA, an OBP made up of higher BA is better than one that is not. So you do lose information by focusing only on, say, OBP and throwing out BA, but OBP is still a better predictor if, for some reason, you want to use only one basic statistic. In any case the advanced hitting metrics (like wRC+) include all of this anyways. They know how to convert batting stats to runs to wins.
> Let me illustrate this concept by rephrasing the question Tom Tango asked of whether a .260/.365/.510 line is better than a .315/.365/.510 line. Letâs frame it as an AVG/BB%/ISO% question. Which is the more productive batter (AVG/BB%/ISO%): a .260/.105/.250 hitter or .315/.050/.195 hitter? > In this instance, itâs clear that the batter is trading 55 points of batting average, for 55 points of isolated patience (read walk%) and 55 points of isolated slugging. As weâll soon see, this is indeed a very good trade-off that works out to roughly +10 runs per 600 plate appearances. It should be noted that people I hold in very high esteem assumed these two batters were roughly equal due to their OBP+SLG being equivalent, which illustrates how using a double slash (OBP/SLG) line can sometimes lead to (in my estimation) incorrect conclusions. I'm pretty sure your math is wrong here because OBP - AVG =/= BB%. For your AVG/BB%/ISO examples, .260 AVG with 10.5% BB rate is a .338 OBP, and .315 AVG with 5% BB rate is a .349 OBP. Assuming PA-BB=AB of course.
[Ok but there are other measures](https://imgur.com/a/hIT8bKd). The data here is outdated somewhat but it holds true.
Thatâs the good stuff right there
Hitting for singles and high average, combined with low K% is the most underrated aspect of baseball in 2023 to me
Hello, fellow Luis Arraez fan.
Hello, fellow Luis Arraez fan.
*Steven Kwan Intensifies*
Can us Yandy Diaz fans hang out with you guys?
Be good to him please
Ichiro
Ichiroâs favorite active player right now is Luis Arraez. Rod Carewâs too.
Even though guys like that may not create the most runs, they are some of the most fun to watch; especially when they have speed.
Granted I'm an old fogey, but "entertaining," "fun to watch," and "athletic" need to be valued a lot more than they are these days. I get it; I do. The advanced stats optimizations are the objectively most *productive* way to play baseball in aggregate, but fuck me, between the mega-shifts and TTO-uber allez that has taken root, baseball was just a lot more fun to watch in the 80s and 90s. Even Jomboy came around after watching all the old World Series. A steal or a bunt may statistically be the same as giving away an out, but if you look at the NPB and MLB today, I know which is the more fun brand of baseball to watch.
I would love if every stadium moved their fences back 20 feet. Itâll never happen but itâs the quickest fix, imo.
The opposite has been happening in a lot of stadiums in MLB, fences have come in.
I think a large amount of people would agree with you that it's much more fun to watch small ball and speedsters and contact hitters. I'm a big analytics person and love everything sabermetrics. At the same time, TTO baseball is more boring to watch and I welcome the new rule changes.
Maybe some of those prospects of yours will bring that to your lineup for a change.
Give me small ball over TTO any day.
Jeff? Is that you?
Thatâs why the Guardians were so much fun to watch last year
You just described Guardians baseball
We truly did not deserve Ichiro.
Totally agree. Min/maxing launch angle and exit velo might be the smartest thing from a value standpoint over a 162 game season. However, having I feel like that strategy doesnât payoff against elite pitchers that you are going to see in the playoffs. Being able to get slap singles and change your approach with RISP against elite pitchers is very underrated.
Actually HR hitting is better in the playoffs than stringing together singles
But my feelings donât agree with that assessment.
Thatâs fair. Boom or bust is the most frustrating to watch. Hoping the new rule changes help with that!
The exact opposite of this is true. Itâs extremely hard to bunch singles together to score off modern bullpens when guys like Edwin Diaz and Emmanuel Clase throw 100+ with unhittable sliders lead to BAA in the .150s so Iâd rather my guys swing hard and hope they run into one for a homer.
I recently looked at this, and TTO% has basically zero correlation with playoff winning percentage.
You are saying this because you find this approach more aesthetically pleasing, not that itâs a better strategy Hitting HRs is still the better strategy in the postseason.
[ŃдаНонО]
sure BA is reasonably predictive of run scoring, but OBP is way better and right next to it, so there's no real reason not to use OBP. why pretend walks don't exist? they happen and they get you on base
Did you read the article?
I skimmed it and saw a couple points I didn't really agree with. one, criticizing OBP for not weighting hits and walks equally. It doesn't, but nor does it claim to - that's wOBA. OBP it is what is it, the percent of the time you get on base. If you subtract OBP from 1, you get out% - the percent of the time you make an out. Not sure why this fact is glossed over but I think that's a huge part of why it's so useful. Plus it's an easy concept to wrap your mind around - if you come to the plate, what's the probability you'll get on base? Meanwhile, if someone asked me to define BA, I dont even know what I'd say - the percent of the time you get a hit, in chances in which you weren't walked, hit by a pitch, ordered by the manager to try for a bunt and were successful (but not if you failed), or hit a sac fly? And if asked why those are excluded, I would not know what to say. If asked whether the stat would be more accurate if all events were included, I would agree that makes sense. BA is a weird stat I can't really explain succinctly and that's part of why it isn't great.
I had no idea that the Schaumburg Boomers said thatâŚ
isnât OBP just AVG older more mature brother?
Like, I think avg is an important stat to have, cause two players could have a .350 OBP, but one could bat .280, and the other .220.
The .280/.350 is the better individual season but the .220/.350 is easier to replicate moving forward and usually comes with higher ISO as well.
But they both *snaps fingers at Jonah Hill*
Get on base.
I feel like this article headline diverges pretty drastically from the actual content. The boomers were absolutely not right, their claim that batting average was important as a standalone statistic was pretty soundly refuted by... the article claiming they were right? Batting average is an ingredient in the creation of better stats, it is not all that helpful by itself.
The headline is an inaccurate summary designed to generate clicks but you can tell it's not working because most of the comments in this thread clearly only read the title anyway
The "thesis" is quite a straw man. It seems to create this by confusing the distinction, maybe even intentionally, of AVG and hits. *No one* will argue that hits aren't important. It's also a bit ironic that the author focuses on criticism that AVG only seems useless in part because it's generally used as part of a triple slash line, then goes on to champion AVG *as part of a different triple slash line*. Never is AVG actually really evaluated on its own, only in the context of other stats OBP and SLG, and in triple slash lines. If you remove the click baity headline/thesis it's interesting.
Also a couple of graphs are just a bunch of dots with not much correlation that they just drew a line through
A single is only marginally more valuable than a walk, and much less valuable than an XBH. BA is much better than just taking a random guess, but it is essentially meaningless once you have OBP and slugging. Ben Clemens of FanGraphs describes this well here: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/instagraphs/the-triple-slash-line-conundrum-by-era/ Basically BA is important only in the absence of better stats.
That's the entire issue with this. He's just trying to invent new metrics with a dumb title, even though metrics do take BA into account. OPS is a simple one for determining how much damage a guy is really doing....and it includes BA. So all he's complaining about is that we don't use the phrase Batting Average.
As a boomer, WTF is âISO?â
Isolated Power: ( total bases - hits ) / at bats Or: SLG - AVG
Itâs really important until youâre the 2022 white Sox and only hit singles while having like the second best team BA in the league
Yes the number of games where we had 10+ hits and 1-2 runs got old really fast.
It feels like OBP and ISO (or even OBP and SLG) tells you most of what you're getting out of AVG/BB%/ISO. Singles and walks just aren't that different value-wise and that's the main benefit of breaking down OBP into AVG and BB%.
https://www.fangraphs.com/guts.aspx?type=cn A single is a lot more valuable than a walk. 10 singles is worth 2 more runs than 10 walks.
Yes, but itâs a lot easier to find a guy with a .350 OBP than a .350 BA.
Yeah every 10 points of batting average is worth about 1 additional run over a season, holding OBP and ISO constant. Separating K% from BABIP when it comes to how one got their batting average is probably more important than separating singles from walks.
I know it's less intuitive and there's a place for non-manipulated stats, but can we all just use wRC+ and xwOBA and be done with it?
The funniest part is just now in the comments of this blog he admitted that by the measure he's using in this post wRC+ is actually the worst one. So clearly something's seriously suspect about this analysis.
â+â is creating the error there because its actively attempting to strip out relevant context to runs produced (park factors). The stat that says âheres what the rockies should have hit if they played in a neutral ballpark is obviously going to struggle to predict how many runs they actually scored playing in coors field. Youd want to hold ballpark constant to test wrc+
no you donât understand, we canât prioritize stats that are extremely accurate at evaluating past performance *and* predicting future success because the acronyms confuse me and i might not intuitively understand how the math works!
Tbf I can understand why some fans don't want to view stats as if they're math homework. Most aren't going to put in the effort to learn how wRC+ or xWOBA works. AVG, BB%, and ISO on the other hand work as back of the napkin stats and together paint a solid picture of a hitter. Remember, most fans don't spend their spare time looking up advanced stats. That's for front offices and analytical fans - which are over represented in online baseball spaces.
We just need to normalize the second kind of stat as something that people whose whole lives are baseball have figured out, and if the method is good enough for them, the result is good enough for you.
Just responding to what Iâm seeing in the thread. A high average is obviously almost always very good, the whole point is that hitting for a high average isnât the only way to be a good offensive player, finding undervalued players is what sabermetrics are all about.
Am I the only one that feels ISO is an underutilized statistic? Granted, Iâm sure the big brains upstairs know all about itâŚhowever I feel it should be talked about more, and normalized in baseball banter.
I think it should be utilized more than SLG is at the moment, just because I think that ISO actually gives people an actual statistical power output that they think SLG gives them.
Apart from the statistical measurements, watching people walking is boring as fuck. We want to watch hitters, ya know, HIT THE BALL. More hits is a higher average and therefore more entertaining. So batting average may or may not be important sabermetrically, but itâs important as entertainment, which in the end is what baseball is all about.
I mean, I like the battle between pitcher and batter, as many people say they do. So watching a guy draw a walk is entertaining to me.
Oh I thought it was about the parade at the end of the season.
Perhaps to a point, but its failure to fully depict offensive ability is glaring. For example, George Sisler and Lou Gehrig have identical career AVG (all the way out to four decimal places) but thereâs no doubt who the better hitter is. The same goes for pitchers and ERA. Yes, good pitchers often have good ERAs but that doesnât mean that ERA is the best way to evaluate a pitcherâs performance.
I think people are getting hung up on the title. And to be fair, I don't think this article really does much to argue that OBP and SLG aren't better predictors of run-scoring than AVG. Folks, OBP and SLG are still more predictive. However, it does pose a really interesting statistical case for why AVG was "doomed" from the start of these analyses and can still be a solid part of a different stat-line. /u/elibenporat you made a really interesting case about the collinearity between AVG, OBP, and SLG. Like, yeah -- it's impossible for AVG to outperform either of those metrics because the other two *contain* AVG plus some other bits of data! Any time you add variables to a regression, r-squared improves. Even if OBP predicts runs better, AVG is the main driver of OBP. Clearly AVG is important. With that, I personally don't think we should care. Like, if "AVG + a little bit of information" is better correlated to runs than just plain AVG, why shouldn't we use it instead? However, I really like your triple-slash of AVG/BB%/ISO, though, which is the meat of the argument to my mind. I think it gives a really nice illustration of the type of hitter someone is, and doesn't have the issues illustrated by Tom Tango (where changing one number affects the underlying calculations of the other two). That "BAPP" and OBP are essentially interchangeable for run-prediction makes sense to me, since it's all the same components. Good article, worth the read.
It is worth the read, but I feel like there's a conflation between *hits* and *batting average* in the article when they really aren't the same thing. Batting average isn't contained in OBP, hits are. Same with slugging. And it's true that batting average on it's own isn't a great predictor of runs, and the author doesn't even attempt to suggest otherwise. But there's no possible way to come up with any reasonable runs predictor that doesn't include hits, for pretty obvious reasons. That doesn't mean batting average is important, it means hits are important.
I canât believe we are still having this conversation.
Am I the only one who doesnât mind the modern game or TTO? Iâve been watching for almost 2 decades now and Iâve never felt my enjoyment from watching the game wane over that time. Itâs still as fun for me to watch today as it was 15 years ago.
people oftentimes donât actually like baseball, they like what baseball used to represent to them when they were younger, so now they go on baseball subreddits and watch a majority of the MLB season to complain about how âboringâ the game is
Same here. It doesn't conflict with the romanticism or fun of baseball for me, unlike how others insist that it kills it.
Well it takes much more skill to hit now than it did 20-30 years ago, so watching that skill is more impressive I would say.
this may be the dumbest thing posted on this sub ever. Yeah no baseball FO has looked into whether batting average was important or not, they totally don't pay analysts thousands of dollars to figure this stuff out. Some random dude on reddit however, has figured out that batting average correlates better to scoring runs by making up some fake ass stat. **Except oh wait, even his own article says otherwise with AVG correlating the second least to creating R/600PA!** read some actual work in the subject than just making shit up to fit your own preconcieved notions of what "good baseball" is.
yes, hitting the ball more is better for your ball club. next question
Bill James is a boomer. The original SABR guys were boomers.
Always has been
I guess there's 2 related but separate questions: does AVG show you how much a players ABs contributed to wins in a season, and does AVG do enough to show how good a player actually is? IIRC one of the main criticisms of AVG is that it's particularly vulnerable to variability in good/bad fortune a hitter faces from year to year. Hitters can get an extra 10 bloop singles, or they could line out hard 10 times and look like a completely different guy at the end of the year. Advanced metrics do a good job of cutting through a lot of that. It's the difference between a stat being reflective and being predictive. If you're a FO making decisions based on a player's AVG you'll probably do worse than a FO looking at hard contact rate
Itâs funny to try to do the boomer thing here since Bill James was born in 1949.
Virtually no 'classic' stats are meaningless. They just don't always tell you what some people claim they did. Batting average tells you something. It just doesn't tell you who is the better hitter. (Except for pitching Wins. They tell you practically nothing. They tell who was the pitcher of record credited with the Win. That is all.)
I had to stop when I got to the part that said OBP = AVG + BB%. No. No it does not. AVG has a different denominator (AB) than OBP/SLG (PA). If all you have is AVG, then yes, it's an OK indicator of a player's skill. But if you have either of the other two, AVG is mostly irrelevant.
BILLY: Okay, here's who we want. Number one: Jeremy's big brother, Jason. BARRY: Oh, God. Billy, that's trouble. ROCCO: Billy, look, if Iâyeah. Billy, if I may, he's had his successes on the fieldâ BILLY: His batting average is all we're looking at now. And Jason gets an awful lot of hits, which is why he costs 4.1 million. GRADY: Jeez, Billyâ BILLY: Number two: Ichiro Suzuki. KEOUGH: Oh, no. ARTIE: Not a good idea. BISHOP: "Young Man" Suzuki? BILLY: Why is that? BISHOP: The NPB is so excited about his prospects, they're willing to extend his contract to keep him. BILLY: Exactly. GRADY: Ten years from now, Suzuki, big name. Will've been in big games. August, we're lucky if he's gonna have a slugging percentage that's twice his weight. BILLY: Grady. GRADY We'll be lucky to get 250 total bases out of him. Why do you like him? [BILLY points at PETE.] PETE: Because he hits for average. HOPKINS: What is this? BARRY: What are we doing? BILLY: Okay, number three: Joe Mauer. ALL: Who? MAN 2: Mauer? BILLY: Exactly. He sounds like an Oakland A already. Yes, he's had a little problem withâ HOPKINS: Little problem? He can't throw. Elizabethton wants to cut him. No one wants to pick him up. BILLY: That's good for us. He's cheap. GRADY: Let me get this straight. You're gonna get an 18-year-old guy that's been released by a single Appalachian League team because he's got a 32% caught stealing rate because he can't throw. BILLY: He can't throw and he can't field. But what can he do? HOPKINS: Oh, boy. BILLY: Guys, check your reports or I'm gonna point at Pete. ALL: He hits for average. BILLY: He hits for average. ROCCO: So he singles a lot. BILLY: He hits for a high batting average, Rocco. Do I care if it's a single or a triple? Pete? PETE: You do not. BILLY: I do not.
This is a dumb thread full of straw manâs. How is this debate still going in 2023?
I posted a bunch of correlations between season stats and playoff win percentage to show that itâs a crapshoot, and I got multiple comments basically saying âyeah but have you considered that the Astros win a bunch so all of this is wrong.â Debates like these will go on for the rest of our lives.
Hereâs the point: I have never heard a playerâs wRC+ mentioned and my first thought being âok, but whatâs his batting average?â
Imagine being some numbers nerd and personally telling Ichiro that batting average isnt important lol
are these batting nerds who say batting average isnât important in the room with us now?
When did it become unimportant?
Boomers also say a single is as good as a walk and in most cases it is
Pretty good article with a solid conclusion. It makes me laugh when people dismiss something for being outdated and then it turns out to actually matter. Maybe the fact BA endured for over a century is because it's most representative stat?
>Maybe the fact BA endured for over a century is because it's most representative stat? The article pretty clearly shows it isn't though...
It being the most representative stat isn't the conclusion. It's literally the opposite of the conclusion lol. It's not the best metric by any means, but it's also not worthless.
Most representative of what?