Orientation: Sabermetrics 101

OK, kids, get your butts in your seats and listen up. Class is about to begin and I’m going to need your undivided attention. Welcome to Sabermetrics 101 and I’m your instructor. I hope you all know how to use a calculator, because you’ll get left in the dust if you don’t. You want that little edge in your fantasy league that will help you snag that sleeper in the late rounds? Well, pay attention, because you’re going to have to work for it.

First off, let’s define sabermetrics. No doubt you’ve all heard the term tossed around and wondered just what it is. Basically, it’s just using different mathematical formulas to analyze baseball statistics. It is named for SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research, which was founded in Cooperstown, NY in 1971. It currently has over 7,000 members, but it’s most famous is undoubtedly Bill James, known as the “Father of Sabermetrics.”

Are you all still with me? Now, to the meat and potatoes of the movement. Most major league talent evaluators have shunned sabermetrics, until recently. It was written off as a movement of nerds that had nothing better to do. It wasn’t until the Oakland A’s started to have success with their young General Manager Billy Beane did people start to take notice.

An unabashed supporter of sabermetrics, Beane managed to field winning teams on a shoestring budget. No other “small market” team was even close to Oakland’s seemingly bottomless supply of bargain bin superstars. Why was this? The answer lied in Beane’s talent evaluation methods, namely sabermetrics. Other teams have taken to the notion that sabermetrics is a benefit they can no longer ignore. Currently, General Managers J.P. Ricchardi in Toronto and Theo Epstein in Boston are the most high profile sabermetric saviors. Epstein’s is a special case, however.

Beane’s A’s has always performed well beyond what their team salary would lead others to believe. Ricchardi is in a similar situation with the Blue Jays. In Epstein’s Red Sox, sabermetrics now has the platform to work within a big budget for the first time. In fact, the team has hired Bill James as one of many talent evaluators surrounding Epstein. It should prove to be an interesting season in Boston with this new line of thinking in place. After years of GM’s building teams that could pound Fenway’s left field wall, Epstein is already showing that on base percentage will be taking precedence over the old way of thinking. His recent moves acquiring Todd Walker and Jeremy Giambi are good examples that the Red Sox are now valuing getting on base instead of hitting one run homers.

What is it, though, that makes sabermetrics so special? What’s wrong with batting average and home runs and runs batted in? The answer is that sabermetrics is just another way of evaluating the components that make up the everyday statistics we are so comfortable with. It goes below the surface of the numbers we associate with offensive prowess and gives the user a much better idea of what the stats really hold. I say offensive prowess because defining pitching in sabermetrics is the “new frontier”, so to speak. Evaluating pitching is a hard prospect, since pitchers rely so heavily on the defense behind them. New work is being conducted to separate defense from pitching (Defense Independent Pitching Statistic, or DIPS), however, so the next big boom in sabermetrics is about to take place. I will delve into what sabermetric tools are available for pitching later on.

Sabermetrics, as a study, was founded mainly on offensive numbers. The sabermetric statistic now widely bandied about is OPS. An OPS is merely On-base percentage Plus Slugging percentage. Quite simply, you add a player’s on-base percentage and his slugging percentage and you get his OPS. But how do we obtain the two components? To get a player’s on-base percentage (OBP), you add the number of walks, hits, and hit by pitches and divide it by at bats, walks, hit by pitches, sacrifice hits, and sacrifice flies. It looks like this, and under the formula, I will list Barry Bonds’ 2002 statistics:

OBP = (BB+H+HBP)/(AB+BB+HBP+SH+SF)
.582 = (198+149+9)/(403+198+9+0+2)

In 2002, Barry Bonds had an on-base percentage of .582, meaning he got on base in roughly 58% of his at bats. Amazing. His record number of walks was the reason for that.

Now, a player’s slugging percentage (SLG) is much easier to calculate. All you do here is divide total bases by at bats. Again, after the formula, I have listed Bonds’ 2002 numbers:

SLG = TB/AB
.799 = 322/403

Bonds’ slugging percentage was also eye popping, but how many of you really know what it means? Each base equals a certain value when compiling a slugging percentage. A single is worth .250, or one out of four possible total bases per at bat. Since a player can have no more than four total bases per at bat, meaning a home run, this makes sense. A double is worth .500, or two out of a possible four bases, a triple is .750, or three out of a possible four bases, and a home run is worth 1.000, or four out of four possible bases per at bat. So, what Bonds’ .799 slugging percentage really means is that he averaged over a triple’s worth of base value per at bat, or over three total bases per an at bat.

Now that the hard part is out of the way and you know what each component of OPS means, the actual OPS number is easy to calculate. Here’s the formula and Bonds’ 2002 numbers below it:

OPS = OBP+SLG
1.381 = .582+.799

That’s it, just by adding on base percentage and slugging percentage, we get the player’s OPS. Very simple. What does it mean? Well, a .700 OPS is about average and a .900 OPS is considered outstanding. Bonds’ OPS in 2002 was a remarkable .481 over that “outstanding” line. Bonds needs a category all his own. Maybe “super-human” would suffice?

Recently, OPS has become chic around the game as a means of measuring a players abilities. It is becoming more apparent that batting average alone holds less meaning than it used to. By combining a player’s ability to get on base and his ability to hit for extra bases, we get a much more textured view of his true worth.

All right, that’s enough for one day. If you have any questions about anything sabermetric, you can email me at redsox@fantasyinfocentral.com and I’ll answer it. If enough of you send me questions, I’ll devote entire columns to your emails. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Right now, just master OPS and we’ll see what’s next in the lesson plan.