Baseball Smarter:

[Jeremy Tecktiel]

Baseball is rife with numbers and statistics and, despite what some around the game may say, has been for over a hundred years. Over time, thanks to scores of baseball nerds, the statistics have gotten better, more descriptive. All of the acronyms can be dizzying, they can cause even the most analytically friendly of eyes to glaze over. Listening to someone talk about new metrics can be like entering an 8th grade classroom and trying to understand the slang that is being used. Are they even speaking the same language as me? When did I become old?

 

No one wants to face those questions! They are often accompanied by a feeling of fear and defensiveness. If engaging in something you have loved for your whole life forces you to constantly face these questions, the natural reaction is to push back. The eternal nerds vs. jocks arguments stem from this. To put this argument simply, both sides agree that scoring and preventing runs wins baseball games. Great, problem solved! Everything else is just a case study in what language people use to try to prove they are right.  

 

At their core, these metrics and what they explain are nothing new to the game of baseball. No reasonable person can argue that a single and a home run are equally as good (sorry, not sorry A-Rod). Can you picture a little league game where a kid crushes a ball over the outfielders heads and then stops at first because singles are cool? Great, me neither. That means we are officially on the same page with regards to batting average not being quite enough. 

 

I like to think of batting average as sports broadcasts from the 1990s. Sure, you get a general sense of what is going on, but you have to squint and everything is hazy and you are left wondering how we ever watched sports that way and thought it was good enough. Adding slugging percentage and on-base percentage, the traditional slash line, gets you to the early 2000’s with the advent of HD. Clearly better but still lacking, we need more cameras and more angles! 

 

This is what wOBA, or weighted on base percentage, brings to the table. A full suite of cameras and angles to help see with more clarity. On base percentage assumes that a walk is also equal to a home run, which I think we can all agree is not true. So how much is a walk really worth? Or a single, double, triple, home run for that matter? What about a single to lead off an inning; that has to be more valuable than a single with 2 outs and the bases empty, right? This is where the “weighted” part of wOBA comes in to play. 

 

There are 24 possible situations that a hitter can come to the plate with:

 

Bases Empty (0, 1, or 2 outs)

Runner on 1st (0, 1, or 2 outs)

Runner on 2nd (0, 1, or 2 outs)

Runner on 3rd (0, 1, or 2 outs)

Runners on 1st and 2nd (0, 1, or 2 outs)

Runners on 1st and 3rd (0, 1, or 2 outs)

Runners on 2nd and 3rd (0, 1, or 2 outs)

Bases Loaded (0, 1, or 2 outs)

 

A walk or hit in each of these scenarios has different probabilities of leading to a run, which is still the whole point of baseball! wOBA takes the result of each at bat in each scenario and attributes value to it that is more telling than “hit good, out bad.” Again, no one should argue with this! A bases loaded double obviously does more to help a team score runs than a double with the bases empty. 

 

OPS condenses the slash line by combining on base percentage and slugging percentage and has been pretty widely adopted; you can see it both on TV and at the ballpark with a much higher frequency than in the past. wOBA aims to do essentially what OPS does, it just does it more accurately. While the math and specific weights can be confusing, the idea of wOBA shouldn’t be.

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[twinstalker]

wOBA is the best measure available of who's done best.  It's not a great projection tool because it weighs on base quite a bit, which is important for major leaguers but misleading for minor leaguers.  I mean, if winning minor league games is important, then it's a good measure of that.  So, for example, Emmanuel Rodriguez, when healthy, has a toolkit to win minor league games.  Unfortunately MLB pitchers do not throw with the same inaccuracy that minor leaguers do from rookie ball to AAA, so if taking a walk is the biggest reason for your minor league value, it bodes poorly.  Kevin Youkilis is the only successful major leaguer I can think of who defeated this model with a very good career.

[Brock Beauchamp]

1 hour ago, twinstalker said:

wOBA is the best measure available of who's done best.  It's not a great projection tool because it weighs on base quite a bit, which is important for major leaguers but misleading for minor leaguers.  I mean, if winning minor league games is important, then it's a good measure of that.  So, for example, Emmanuel Rodriguez, when healthy, has a toolkit to win minor league games.  Unfortunately MLB pitchers do not throw with the same inaccuracy that minor leaguers do from rookie ball to AAA, so if taking a walk is the biggest reason for your minor league value, it bodes poorly.  Kevin Youkilis is the only successful major leaguer I can think of who defeated this model with a very good career.

I think that's underselling Youk a little. He was obviously a walk machine, but he also had three consecutive seasons with a slug over .500. He wasn't merely patient; he was also a good hitter. But you're right, you have to be a good hitter or MLB pitchers will just pump strikes at you.