The Yanks led the majors in OBA last year at .362 the Giants were last at .302
So it is pretty important, good offensive teams have high OBAs.
I read Bill James Abstract when it came out ,back in the dead ball era. I always though Baseball was a great game to gage by statistics. But the believers are unable to show manners. They say batting Average means nothing. Yet OBP does. I would suggest Ichiro hitting 380 gets on base a lot. I would also think a player bat the Mendoza line is not getting on base much. Batting average is a huge component of the OBP.
RBIs are important. Yet they are dismissed because a player is not responsible for how many are on base when he gets at bat. It is easier to knock them in for a good hitting team. True ,but, Management builds a team with that in mind. A cleanup hitter who does not get RBIs would be a failure. One that does is just lucky i guess that he plays for a good team.
Using one of the best pure hitters in the game as an example doesn’t say anything beyond how good Ichiro is. And of course batting average is going to be be a huge component of OBP - hitters get more hits than they get walks. We’re not saying *HITS *aren’t important, we’re saying *ONLY HITS *aren’t important.
They’re not - as a measurement of an individual’s ability.
Again, you’re mixing the message. “True believers” wouldn’t say this - they would say “a cleanup hitter that can’t hit when runners are on base is a failure”. Because again - you can’t get anyone on base except yourself.
So if you see a cleanup hitter with only 40 RBIs, you think he’s bad.
I look deeper and see he went up to bat with a total of 50 baserunners and know he’s good/great.*
(That’s a total exaggeration - an 80% rate would be absurdly high, and 40 RBIs would be absurdly low - but I hope you see what I’m trying to say.)
Certainly the batting average accounts for most of a player’s OBP in almost all cases, but it doesn’t account for all of it, so why look at just the one component?
Let’s do an experiment. We’ll take three players with similar career batting averages - Robinson Cano, Placido Polanco and Chase Utley - your guys’ second baseman last year, my guys’, and the team that won the World Series. We’ll leave out the home runs and RBIs for the moment because we’re looking for a leadoff hitter, let’s say.
Cano has the highest average at .307. Polanco’s a career .303 hitter. Utley’s is .296; almost as good but not quite. If you’re picking a guy to put at the top of your lineup, and you look at batting average, you’re going to pick Cano, then Polanco, then Utley even though you’d expect them all to be more or less the same. Except if you look at batting average, you ignore that Cano walks about 30 times a season. Cano’s OBP is .339, Polanco .348, Utley .379. Over 600 plate appearances in your leadoff spot, picking Cano over Utley means that you cost your team about 25 baserunners from the leadoff spot. Which is a big deal, isn’t it? And by focusing on batting average you end up picking players in exactly the opposite order that you’d pick them based on OBP.
On top of that - and here’s where it gets exciting - we have the other component of OPS, which is slugging. We already know each of the three batting averages. If we’re looking for the best hitter of the three, we need to know about how they hit for power, too. So: Cano SLG .480, Polanco .414, Utley .523. Ah-ha! So now we have a much more complete picture of who these three hitters really are. Not only is the guy with the lowest batting average the one who gets on base the most, he also hits the ball way harder than either of the other two and so is by far the best of the three. Cano looks a little better now that we find out he hits for power, whereas Polanco’s advantage in OBP seems to be less of a big deal now that it’s clear he’s only spraying singles.
Having said all of that, if it’s not too much to ask, I’d really like to know what you think about what I just did with the stats. Does that sound like a useful way to look at a player? Is it at all persuasive in terms of showing what OBP in particular does that batting average doesn’t? Just curious; this is a conversation that I really enjoy having with people so I’m interested to hear if it ever works.
That’s true; if you’re looking at your own roster in any given season RBIs will tell you a lot about who is succeeding and who isn’t. Same question as above, though - what if you’re a team trying to determine who is the best among a bunch of players from different teams, say because you’re trying to sign a free agent? Utley had 93 RBIs last year and Cano had 85. Does that mean they’re similar players with similar value, or are you better off looking at the other numbers, is the question a lot of us are asking.
(on preview I’m editing this because Munch already used the Ichiro example. I don’t think I left any remnants but if something is out of place that’s why)
Your not going to keep me with " you can’t get anybody on base but yourself’. A cleanup hitter, the name tells you a lot, follows a lead off hitter with high OBP. Then the 2nd and third are variations of that. By design, their function is to get on base and move runners around to scoring position. Then the clean up hitter comes up with runners in scoring position. It his job to bring them in. If he is successful, you are scoring runs. If not ,you lose momentum and walk away a little more depressed at blowing a scoring chance. He can not get them on base ,that much is true. But he can bring them in. His success or failure is predicated on bringing them in. That is a talent . Hitting under pressure is a talent. I doubt any true baseball management would dismiss RBIs as a cosmic accident.
I’ve never understood the obsession with RBIs - ultimately, it’s a number that comes out of a formula, just like any sabermetric statistic. It’s not even innately less complex than something like OBP, which you can define using elementary school-level mathematics. People bashing “statheads” for their reliance on metrics like OBP or WAR don’t seem to remember that the statistics that they themselves prefer are also nerdy numbers. It’s just that RBIs, AVG, and ERA have been around longer, but that doesn’t mean they’re better numbers. Hell, if they were better, sabermetricians would be trumpeting them. It’s not like Bill James has some dark vendetta against traditional baseball statistics or something - if RBIs and AVG were better predictors of a player’s success than OPS+ or wOBA, then sabermetricians would be pushing for front offices to use them instead.
On another topic - regarding the actual usefulness of RBIs as a statistic in this day and age, I wonder if any saber types have ever attempted to quantify exactly how much of a hitter’s RBIs depend on the guys ahead of him in the order. Considering that a home run is the only situation in which a hitter is 100% responsible for any single RBI, I would imagine that the OBPs of the men hitting ahead of a player have more impact on that player’s RBI total than the player’s own. A high SLG would obviously improve one’s ability to push runners home as well, but without those runners being on base to start with, you’d be left with the solo homer as the only way to get an RBI in that at bat.
Leadoff hitters like Willy Taveras who had an obp of all of .275 last year.
I think the response to this would be the myth of clutch. There have been numerous studies on players’ OBPs with or without runners in scoring position, and there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that any given player is significantly better than any other specifically at hitting with RISP. The range between good and bad hitters’ overall OBP and power numbers dwarfs any effect of “clutch” skills.
IOW, the difference between Albert Pujols and Adam Everett isn’t Pujols being a better hitter than Everett with RISP, but rather Pujols being a better hitter than Everett in all situations.
Does that mean that batting order doesn’t matter? No, of course not - you do want someone in the three-hole that can drive in your first two high-OBP guys. But you pick a guy as your cleanup hitter because he can get on base and, more importantly, because he can mash hell out of the ball no matter when he comes up to bat, because there is literally nobody in baseball who is a bad/mediocre hitter with nobody on base but who morphs into a great hitter with RISP.
Gonzomax, could you at least address the questions I posed to you? Because you’ve totally ignored everything else I said. Like Jimmy said - we enjoy these topics, but you have to put in some feedback. It seems like (every single time) you dismiss everything, and focus on just one little thing that bucks your traditional view of things. If you’re trying to understand the stats, could you spend a few minutes actually doing that rather than dismissing them?
You have to admit, **Gonzo **makes these threads interesting and that is from someone that sympathizes with his viewpoint or what I can make of it.
He doesn’t make it interesting for long. I’m not even sure if he read my post or not.
No, he makes them painful. We address his questions for fear that our silence may imply we agree with the things he says, but he NEVER absorbs anything we say (and we’re not asking for belief or buying into what we say - we’re just looking for some recognition of what we actually said or understanding of our side of the argument). His is the absolute most dishonest form of discourse you can have.
Next time someone brings up the Hall of Fame shortstop from St. Louis, see how many times he argues about playing on astroturf, and how he’s oblivious to any mention of how many games he played on grass, or the years he played in San Diego (also grass).
Well sure, but you get the same boneheadedness in any thread that talks about Pete Rose too.
Or Zach Greinke…
Or Alan Trammell…
Or batting average…
Or RBIs…
Or Wins…
Or…baseball.
Oh, and if anyone didn’t have a reason to join Twitter before this, Ozzie Guillen just joined last night:
:lol: (And I still say Wins are very important despite being a team helped stat, seen to many statistically good pitchers not win as well as the statistically flawed Andy Pettitte on the same basic teams.)
Some actually minor news.
HGH testing to begin in the Minor Leagues now that they have a working test. http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2010/baseball/mlb/02/24/hgh.testing.ap/index.html
Derek Jeter said today “not intersted in free agency”. Not that this is a shock.
I’m not sure I follow. Pitcher X is “statistically” good but doesn’t get many wins, whereas Pitcher Y is “statistically” bad but wins a lot of games… and that means that wins are very important? 
All that shows to me is that wins are a crappy way of measuring pitching ability.
Eh. There’s nothing mysterious about Pettite - he’s been a consistently above average pitcher with some good seasons and two near-Cy Young seasons, he’s been a starter from an early age, he’s only missed about a season’s worth of games to injury, and he’s pitched his entire career for winning ballclubs. If he pitches well into his 40s and gets to or near 300 wins, he won’t be the worst pitcher in the Hall of Fame.
Andy seems to have the ability to get wins without putting up huge strikeout totals or impressive ERAs. There are statistically better pitchers who on arrival in NY, don’t pitch as well or show brilliance part of the time but blow more games with bad outings but do end up with high Ks and/or lower ERAs.
Going back to the 80s, it seemed like Doyle Alexander just could not pitch in NY but did great in other places, I would of course rather have an Andy Pettitte or David Wells than a Doyle Alexander.
This is mostly a reaction to at least in posting, many on this board seem to place to little importance on wins and winning percentage. Some pitchers seem to have a nose for wins and others do not. Call it pitching to the score or whatever you like.
I’ve already seen the talk on some baseball sites that his ERA is too high and his great winning pct should be disregarded. I don’t think I have seen that here though.