Are some stats totally meaningless?

[NewMarketSean]

There is no ONE stat that should be used in such a light.

Stats are meant to be examined and analyzed as a whole.

Why do you think there are so many of them?

Good point, but there are stats that you look at before any other stats, to get a feel for what kind of player they are.

For me, it's OPS for offense. I am still having trouble figuring out the defensive stats.

But I hope that a guy is at least average defensively, and any shortcomings he makes up for with his offense.

BA is so far down on the list... I normally just look at it to see what my 12 year old self would have thought about a player.

[J.D.]

OBP is my favorite way to evaluate a hitter, followed by OPS.

Here's one that Oldfan will roast me for. Not that it's meaningless... it's just not as important as the old timers will tell you it is:

W-L record for pitchers.

[NewMarketSean]

OBP is my favorite way to evaluate a hitter, followed by OPS.

Here's one that Oldfan will roast me for. Not that it's meaningless... it's just not as important as the old timers will tell you it is:

W-L record for pitchers.

At least average is dictated by the batter himself. A pitcher has no control over W-L.

The best he can do is pitch a shutout and hope for a run to control his W-L record and that still involves elements outside of his control.

So I agree.

[RVAbird]

But really, there are no useless stats. Even AVG can tell you *something*. The problem lies in that it is valued too highly and often in exclusion of every other stat. AVG had its heyday when I was a kid, but it appears to be losing its reign as king of stats... probably because the baseball card market is in such a shambles.

-m

There is no ONE stat that should be used in such a light.

Stats are meant to be examined and analyzed as a whole.

Why do you think there are so many of them?

These are the two most important things said in this thread. There is no such thing as a meaningless stat (assuming it is recorded correctly) and there is no such thing as an all-inclusive stat.

BA is very meaningful. It tells you what percentage of official at bats resulted in a clean hit. RBI tells you how many runs a batter has driven in. The only way you can consider a statistic meaningless is if you require of it that it tells you exactly how productive a player is. No stat can do that. Certainly not OPS.

Every statistic tells you something, and every statistic can be useful for at least one goal. No statistic tells you everything.

[orayole]

For an individual, wins are 100% useless. Wins belong as a team stat only. Giving them to individuals is nonsense. Same goes to losses. It's a team game. You win and lose as a team.

[Eight]

Obviously average isn't meaningless. Even if you think it doesn't give you much of a clue as to the value of a hitter and that SLG and OBP do better (I agree), it certainly speaks to what type of hitter a guy is. If two guys have a .350/.450 OBP and one has a .250 AVG and one has a .320 AVG, that's an interesting piece of info.

RBI isn't anything as a measure of value or predictor of future value, but 120 RIB is 120 RBI and that has to have some meaning.

Even W/L record has a lot of meaning. Certainly not over a sample of one year, but the correlation between being a good pitcher and winning a lot of games, over the course of a career, is pretty strong.

Of course there are some meaningless stats (or perhaps they're better described as metrics). That ESPN player rating number is pretty laughable. BP's WARP probably has some meaning, but considering no one actually knows how to come up with it, it's not particularly useful to anyone.

[crawdad]

Sure, for minor leagues being able to hit the ball is very important. For all the people who say that batting average and strikeouts aren't important, thats usually just talking about major leaguers.

For minor a leaguer to have low average and high K's is a very bad sign, because those problems usually just get worse as a guy climbs the ladder.

Once they are at the majors though, it doesn't really matter if they have a low average and high K's, as long as they overcome for those weaknesses. Adam Dunn's a great example.

Likewise, K's are a good indicator for how college hitters do on a pro level. They are not very useful elsewhere.

[crawdad]

For an individual, wins are 100% useless. Wins belong as a team stat only. Giving them to individuals is nonsense. Same goes to losses. It's a team game. You win and lose as a team.

Eh, this isnt exactly true. Wins do correlate to pitching talent, just not as well as many believe. For a stat to be useless it would have to have no ability to predict future success.

[RShack]

For an individual, wins are 100% useless. Wins belong as a team stat only. Giving them to individuals is nonsense.

That's not true.

Any great SP will have a whole bunch of W's

Any SP who doesn't get a whole bunch of W's isn't a great SP.

The fact that W's are influenced by the team does not mean they're useless. This new-vs-old kind of revisionist BS that helps ruin the good insights that modern stats do provide. Just because new stats are useful, that does not mean the old ones aren't.

[BaltimoreTerp]

Any SP who doesn't get a whole bunch of W's isn't a great SP.

So a guy with 7 wins in (most of) a full season with, say, a 3.70 ERA (25% better then league-average) and a 1.21 WHIP with 6.3 strikeouts per nine innings isn't any good?

That's the problem. Wins can tell you something, because to get a bunch of wins you have to be somewhat consistent at pitching well. However, because wins are so dependent on the offense (and in the modern era on relievers) they need to be taken with a grain of salt. Just like runs batted in is so dependent on having runners on-base.

[crawdad]

So a guy with 7 wins in (most of) a full season with, say, a 3.70 ERA (25% better then league-average) and a 1.21 WHIP with 6.3 strikeouts per nine innings isn't any good?

That's the problem. Wins can tell you something, because to get a bunch of wins you have to be somewhat consistent at pitching well. However, because wins are so dependent on the offense (and in the modern era on relievers) they need to be taken with a grain of salt. Just like runs batted in is so dependent on having runners on-base.

I think what he is saying in general is that over the course of a career, wins will be a decent indicator of performance and that seasonal abnormalities will be evened out. Wins is a poor stat to use, but there is some relationship to performance. Kind of like stolen bases and ability to steal. Typically, if you steal a lot of bases . . . you are good at stealing because the coach would stop you otherwise.

[IamtheSkip]

I think what he is saying in general is that over the course of a career, wins will be a decent indicator of performance and that seasonal abnormalities will be evened out. Wins is a poor stat to use, but there is some relationship to performance. Kind of like stolen bases and ability to steal. Typically, if you steal a lot of bases . . . you are good at stealing because the coach would stop you otherwise.

Didn't Steve Trachsel lead the Mets in wins while sporting a pretty high ERA in like 2006?

[zff4]

Help me then. From time immemorial we've all know that .300 is the grail of AVG. You hit .300 you've got a career.

Any stat in exclusion is deceptive but with respect to OBP, SLG and OPS, what are the analgous numbers? Not the sky high numbers, but the baseline numbers that tell us, "this is a good player."

[eb45]

I would guess that about a .375 OBP or .475 SLG is analogous to a .300 BA. Not in terms of value, but in terms of difficulty to attain. Throughout history, 201 players have ended their career with a batting average of .3000 or higher (HoFer Enos Slaughter is 202nd with a .2999). The 201st best OBP is .3754, and the 201st best SLG is .4734, both right around the numbers I mentioned earlier. Using that math, a .850 OPS would be seem to be about analogous, but keep in mind that it is more difficult to be good at both getting on base and slugging than one or the other. This explains why the 201st best OPS belongs to Eddie Murray at .8355.

These comparisons are from all different eras, though, so they may be flawed. Still, a good rule of thumb is that an OBP of .360 up is very good, as is a SLG of .450+.

[O'sFanThruJune]

There is no ONE stat that should be used in such a light.

Stats are meant to be examined and analyzed as a whole.

Why do you think there are so many of them?

When you're trying to compare players, more information is helpful, and it's nice to be able to look at AVG/OBP/SLG/HR/SB/ERA/K/BB/etc, but it can be awfully hard to sort players while looking at that volume of information. I think it's pretty handy to have stats that attempt to take all of these factors into account, such as EqA+ or WARP3. I would never want to stop using those other statistics, but it's good to have a quick way to look at one statistic and get an idea where a player stands relative to his peers.

Even W/L record has a lot of meaning. Certainly not over a sample of one year, but the correlation between being a good pitcher and winning a lot of games, over the course of a career, is pretty strong.

Tell that to Bert Blyleven.

Of course there are some meaningless stats (or perhaps they're better described as metrics). That ESPN player rating number is pretty laughable. BP's WARP probably has some meaning, but considering no one actually knows how to come up with it, it's not particularly useful to anyone.

I could not disagree more strongly with that philosophy. The value in traditional statistics is that they are easily calculated. Accuracy of evaluation is sacrificed for ease of computation. These days, we have these wonderful machines called computers, and we no longer have to make that sacrifice. We can pore over massive amounts of data and determine the actual value of different events in terms of run-scoring potential. We can enter a complicated formula once, and allow a spreadsheet to calculate results thousands of times over, rather than plugging away with a calculator or slide rule. We don't have to use OPS, and just assume that OBP is equally as valuable as SLG. We can use the data to get a closer idea of their relative value. And if that means our equation has an ugly 0.485 * X^1.3 in it, so what?

And why should AVG be any more valuable just because you know how to calculate it? Unless you distrust MLB and feel the need to calculate everyone's stats on your own to verify them, I don't see the value of having the formula memorized. It is certainly useful to know what sorts of factors go in to the equation, but I don't feel the need to know it exactly.