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The High Boskage House Baseball-Analysis Web Site baseball team and player performance examined realistically and accurately |
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About The Specific Baseball Measures We UseThe Standard Baseball MeasuresSeveral of the calculated measures are standard in baseball and--presumably--already familiar to you. For batters, "PA" is simply total Plate Appearances--the total of at-bats, walks, hit-by-pitch, and sacrifice flys (but, for our work here, not sacrifice bunts). The "BA" is the familiar Batting Average, the "SA" is the familiar Slugging Average, and the "OBA" is the familiar On-Base Average. For pitchers, "IP" and "ERA" are obvious; "K/W"--the strikeout-to-walk ratio--will also be familiar to many, though here we exclude intentional bases on balls (IBB) from the walks datum. We include the K/W ratio because it is often thought to be a barometer of pitching ability (an idea we find to be about half-true). By now, "BABIP" (Batting Average on Balls in Play) is become another "standard" measure. It is just what its name says: the hits obtained on all balls put in play--that is, all balls that are theoretically fieldable (that's at-bats less strikeouts and home runs plus sac flies.) Some Non-Standard Baseball MeasuresThe "HA" is an HBH stat--the "Hitting Average". It is similar to the BA, but the basis is all plate appearances (except sac bunts), not just at-bats. It thus expresses the batter's actual likelihood of getting a hit in a particular appearance, which the Batting Average (one of the least useful of conventional stats) does not. The "PF" is the Power Factor; it is total bases divided by hits, or--put another way-- the average number of bases per hit by the batter. This number minus 1 is often called "isolated power"; in either format, it is a good measure of a batter's actual ability to drive a batted baseball (though speed is in the mix, it has little effect, because home runs dominate the PF). Power Factors run in well-established ranges: from 1.15 to 1.25 is the now-rare true "Judy" or "banjo" or "slap" hitter--the man who just gently pokes the ball over the infielders for a single, only very occasionally getting a double and almost never a home run. From 1.30 to 1.35 is the usual non-power-hitter value. From 1.5 up, we are dealing with power hitters, though the low end of that range is nowadays debased by the SillyBall (values from 1.35 to 1.50 are unusual, and when seen are typically very slow runners who are getting singles where an even average runner would get doubles.) A value of 2.0 or above is rare even in a single season, and for a career was once (in the sunny days before the SillyBall) seen only once in a decade or so; nowadays, it is not that rare, but is still unusual. The "BBA", the BB Average, is simply the average rate at which the man takes walks (walks per plate appearance); likewise, the "KA" is simply the average rate at which the man strikes out (strikeouts per plate appearance). The "TBA" is the "Total-Base Average": total bases per plate appearance. It stands to the Slugging Average as the Hitting Average does to the Batting Average, and is correspondingly very much more meaningful than the SA. A perhaps useful way to relate these measures to a baseball game you see before your eyes is this:
The TOP: Total Offensive ProductivityTo the extent that a man's total value to a team as a batter can be expressed in a single number (most analysts accept that it can) the TOP is HBH's rendition of such a number. Simply put, the TOP is the number of runs that would be scored in a full, normal-length season by a baseball line-up of nine men each an exact clone of the man being rated. There is an extended discussion of the TOP and baseball-analysis theory in general elsewhere on this site. Key* here is that the TOP is not a relative and thus subjective measure: it is an absolute measure, meaning that it has a demonstrable real-world application and possesses what scientists call "falsifiability"--in other words, its correctness can be tested and proved or disproved. It has been tested, thoroughly, and has not been falsified. (* If you're a sportscaster, that's "very key".) One can thus, in principle, combine the TOPs of the men on an actual baseball team and make presumably useful and reasonably accurate predictions of how many runs that team will score. And indeed, subject to some qualification and technicalities, one can in fact as well as principle. The technicalities are these: first, one must of course weight the men's individual TOPs by their percentage of playing time; and second, for technical reasons, the team TOP will not be the simple average of even the weighted individual TOPs but will be a varying few percent lower ("the average of the means is not, in general, equal to the mean of the averages," for those who care). But when applied correctly, the method does work. Its limitations as a means of projecting the final October standings on the morning of opening day are all associated with one variable: playing time. Men get injured or traded, managers get good or bad inspirations, and so on. One cannot get rich by going to a baseball sports book with these techniques, because one cannot project--even approximately--who, by season's end, will actually have played how much where. We are scientists, not thaumaturges. But one can use the principles to "engineer" a team that should win a specified number of games (if the horses can be had). |
Site Mechanics:
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Site Directory:
This site's Front Page Late News about the site |
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(team and player performance evaluations, updated daily) |
The Performance Stats: | ||
Team Measures:
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Player Measures:
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(meanings and explanations of the things on this site) |
Baseball-Analysis Background: | ||
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For You Rookies:
what this site is all about--what it is telling you about baseball, and how, and why |
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Some Baseball Analysis
Theory: a semi-technical backgrounding on modern baseball analysis |
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Baseball Stat Definitions: the standard and the unique statistics we present |
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The "Quality of Pitching" Measures: why they are the best way to evaluate pitching |
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The SillyBall: why baseball before and after 1993 is really two different games |
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Fielding and Defense in Baseball how important defense is or isn't in baseball, and how to correctly evaluate it |
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Baseball Data Normalization: why raw stats need "correction", and how and why we can and cannot apply it |
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"Steroids" and Other "Performance-Enhancing
Drugs": why just about everything you think you know about them is wrong (now a full-fledged site of its own) |
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(miscellaneous but not unimportant) |
Some Miscellaneous Information: | ||
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The Team-Performance Table there is a lot in that Table, and this explains what it all is |
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The HBH Baseball-Analysis Formula Tested what we get when we apply it to half a century of team stats |
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The Pitfalls of Park Factors an explicit, detailed demonstration of how and why they are so dubious |
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About High Boskage House who we are and why we might know what we're talking about |
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Links About Eric Walker links to baseball-related pages concerning the webmaster here |
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Links To A Select Few Other Useful Baseball Sites including those that link to this one |
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(new, used--find any book, anywhere in the world) |
The High Boskage House Baseball Shop: | ||
What Makes This "Baseball Shop" Special:
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| Baseball Books Available Today: | |||
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