Baseball is notable in that a player’s batting average is based on what should have happened; e.g., if the player reaches first base but only because a fielder dropped the ball, for recordkeeping purposes he/she’s not credited with a base hit. (Other stats like on-base percentage may show it).
Is this methodology used in any other sports? Quoted stats seem to mostly be aggregate scores; like in football they have total yards; basketball has points scored. As an unpopular kid that always bothered me: Doesn’t it depend on how often they pass you the ball? Pass me the ball enough times in one game and I’ll score 50 points.
In football, when the QB lobs the ball 95 yards on the last play and a teammate happens to catch it instead of an opponent, the QB gets all the credit; behind the scenes do they adjust for the potential for it to have been intercepted?
Some other sports briefly touch on the “should have” aspect; e.g. tennis shows you “unforced errors.”
Do other sports keep these statistics but just use them privately?
The defensive pass interference penalty in football is sort of like this, although the quarterback and the receiver don’t get any individual credit for this. Maybe they should.
Tennis has a term called “unforced errors” that specifically indicates the avoidable moments where errors were made that cost the player a point. Winners are shots that could not reasonable be expected to be returned. Unforced Errors are situations where the player was totally in control and mishit the ball or something.
They compare Winners-Unforced Errors in a ratio and there is something to the idea that if you hit more winners than unforced errors, you are doing well.
Perhaps not quite the same, but in American football, you’ll often see a graphic on TV: “Receiver: Targeted 9 times, 3 receptions”
The idea is that a receiver needs to catch as many balls as possible that are thrown his way, and that a pass thrown should have been a pass caught - even though there are variables out of his control (i.e., how accurately the ball was thrown.) If he’s only catching one-third of the balls thrown his way, that’s a poor performance.
My impression was that figure skating and gymnastics were like this before more rigid scoring. More of what place should you be in vs. what place you actually earned.
It’s the same in football if a pass or run results in lost yardage. That yardage is subtracted from yards gained. In baseball you get credit for a hit if you advance your teams position on the bases, not because you reached base because of someone’s error or your reaching base resulted in other players being out. In football a quarter back is credited with an incompletion even if he hits the receiver right in the numbers with ball but the receiver drops it. This is all scoring based on what actually did happen.
No, reaching base on an error is actually counted as an out for both batting average and on base percentage.
This is actually a flaw in baseball stats. The number of outs assigned to hitters is, in fact, wrong; it exceeds the number of outs that actually happened. It really doesn’t make a great deal of sense, because unlike Tripolar’s other examples, baseball in this sense is adding up things that never actually happened.
Two stats that address this are “Yards After Catch” for receivers and “Air Yards” for QBs. So given two different 50 yard passes, one might have gone the whole 50 yards through the air, while another went only a yard through the air and then the receiver ran another 49 yards.
College football rankings? In pro football, your ranking within your division is simply down to how many wins and losses you have vs. the others in your division; in college football if you barely beat a team you were expected to beat easily you can potentially slip a bit in the rankings, even though you just won.
In that sense, many sports that have ratings/rankings qualify. You lose more points in, say, chess when you lose to a lower-rated player than if you lose to an equally or higher-rated player. Because that outcome was supposed to be less likely.
That isn’t exactly the same as the college football thing though. In chess, you can’t lose points by winning. If a grandmaster plays me, her or his rating cannot suffer if he wins, even if the victory isn’t particularly amazing. They can only lose points by losing or drawing.
In college football, ranking is based by a vote. If Butt-head State beats Beavis Tech by a lower margin than the voters feel they should have, Butthead State could lose ranking despite winning, and Beavis Tech could gain it despite losing.
I can’t think of an a analogy to that in ANY major sport. Other sports that have rankings - tennis, for instance - don’t vote on it. They have points systems with algorithms of varying complexity, and while you can lose points by losing, or by not playing in the case of tennis, you don’t lose points by winning.
I would categorize baseball errors the same way. It’s about recording ability statistics, the fielder’s ability to field a fieldable hit, and the the batter’s ability to produce a fieldable hit. Both of things did or did not happen. If you reach base on an error, you still get the base and/or point, but the fielder gets dinged and the batter gets nothing.
Another example… billiards. I don’t know what the pro term for this is, but occasionally somebody will declare “no shit shots”, meaning if you sink a ball other than the one you called, then you don’t get the bonus shot.
+1
In particular and not uncommon circumstances, under DLS in a rain shortened game, for the team batting second to win they need to score more runs off the same number of overs than the team batting first actually did.
I think the goaltending call in basketball is like this. In goaltending a team is awarded two (or three) points they didn’t actually score. These are given by a referee when in his/her opinion a defender interfered with a shot in a certain way.
As with the baseball example in the OP, with goaltending a player/team is getting credit for what should have happened.
For the purposes of statistics, you are looking at how often the player performed correctly.
If they toss a fly ball to the outfield, they did not perform well. The fact that the outfielder missed it doesn’t improve their performance any.
They still get to go on base, their run still counts if they make it to home. But, when evaluating that player’s performance, the fact that they batted a catchable ball should be taken into account, even if that ball was not caught.
What if I did it because I knew the sun would be in the outfielder’s eyes and that particular outfielder was known fumble the ball or lose it in the sun more often than others?