I’ve been doing a lot of draft prep for fantasy baseball lately, and even did a couple of drafts. Good timing, since the season started last Sunday. There are some statistics in “5x"5” (standard scoring) Fantasy Baseball that are antiquated nonsense when it comes to modern baseball. However, too many sports writers have decided that some statistics are indicative of how great a player is when, in reality, they are a kind of pointless exercise in measuring a player’s value.
There are five categories of which I speak: RBI & Runs, Batting Average, Pitcher Wins, Saves. I am going to get soapboxy here for a bit about RBI/Runs Scored and Pitcher Wins, since those are the most egregious ones to me.
RBI – Runs Batted In (The number of runs resulting from a hit made by that player) & Runs
RuThe ridiculous focus on RBI is one of the most frustrating things when citing player statistics for how good a player is. It’s two-thirds of the “Triple Crown.” This honor is bestowed upon a player who leads the league in batting average, RBI and home runs. In theory, this means that they’re the best player in the league. They made a different title for leading the league in these three categories. This is so dumb.
Don’t get me wrong, RBI was a valuable statistic when it was developed, along with runs scored. Baseball has been around for a long time. A long time. Like back when the only way you could possibly follow a team is by either going to every single game or by reading what happened in box scores. These would tell you the outcome of the game, and who did what. Using RBI and runs scored in that day and age made sense. Who could get a quick summary of who did what during the game. Somewhere along the line runs scored and RBI became deified and distorted into a measure of a player’s independent performance. While it does measure, somewhat, a player’s contribution on the field, it is a worthless measuring stick to compare the value between two players. The same goes for runs scored. I’ll give you a reason why:
We place a player like Ryan Braun in a lineup full of guys who can’t get on base. In fact, he is the only player who gets any hits all year. He gets, say, 35 home runs. This gives him 35 RBI and 35 runs scored for the year. This is because the lineup around him is terrible and nobody gets on base for him to be eligible to get any RBI, and once he gets on, everybody else just gets out. He can’t get any runs in this situation either.
Let’s move Ryan Braun to the greatest lineup in the world, wherein every time Braun hits a home run, there are two men on base. Suddenly, Braun’s RBI jumps from 35 to 105, without Braun doing any extra work or having any more talent than the Ryan Braun of the previous example. Let’s also say every time Braun doesn’t get a HR, he hits a single, then the next guy hits a HR. Let’s say Braun gets 100 singles. That’s 135 runs scored without him really exerting any more skill or talent than the Ryan Braun who had only 35 points scored.
RBI and runs scored are more of a reflection of the team around a player and the position he bats in the lineup. However, somewhere along the line, these two statistics became a measure of individual performance and a valid method of comparing two players. They’re not, and the need to stop.
Unfortunately, there’s not really a good, easily digestible replacement for RBI and runs scored. There are things like oWAR (offensive wins above replacement) that measure the estimated contribution to a team’s overall run output by a particular player that attempts to isolate his contribution from everyone else on the team. This, however, is not an easily digestible statistic. I don’t have problems with runs and RBI, but rather their glorification by sports writers and the general populous. While I don’t like these statistics, they are nothing compared to the pointlessness of…
Pitcher Wins – A measurement of the talent around a pitcher.
If a starting pitcher goes at least 5 innings, and when he leaves his team has the lead, he is credited with a win. If a relief pitcher goes into a tie game in the top of the 9th with two outs, gives up two runs before getting that last out, and then his team scores 3 runs in the bottom of the 9th to win, he gets a win. Right there, that should tell you the pointlessness of wins right there. It’s like they developed the statistic and then reverse engineered the ways in which it should be used. This is such a dumb statistic for more than just the scenario outlined above.
Ladies and Gentleman, I give you Matt Cain. Matt Cain is a starting pitcher for the Giants last year (the one who got the Perfect Game, if you don’t already know). He has been consistently one of the best pitchers in baseball over the past four years or so. The only issue is that due to terrible run support, Cain has not had a great W-L record. On the flip side, moderately okay pitchers like Kyle Lohse can end up in the top 10 in wins because their squad gives them run support and lets them fall backwards into wins.
I am going to paint a picture about why pitcher wins are pointless the same way I did with RBI & runs scored. Let’s put Justin Verlander on the Astros. The Astros struggle to ever put any points on the board. If Verlander gives up only one run a game, which would be incredible, over the course of a season, but the Astros do their best Astros impersonation, and only manage to score a run in half of Verlander’s games, that means, at best, Verlander is looking at wining exactly half of his games. This is entirely because the offense around him is horrendous and can’t hit its way out of a wet paper bag.
Next, let’s put 2012 Tim Lincecum on the 2012 Texas Rangers. The Rangers averaged 4.98 runs per game last year, tops in the bigs. Lincecum had a 5.18 ERA, but was averaging giving up 3.24 runs per start. If we assume Lincecum gives up 3.24 runs and the Rangers bullpen doesn’t blow it, he has a chance to go undefeated last year. Tim Lincecum was hot garbage until he switched to the bullpen and if you compare Lincecum on the Rangers in this example to Verlander on the Astros in the prior example, you can see that pitcher wins are even more pointless than runs scored or RBI for hitters. It’s entirely tied to the performance of everybody else on the team.
Quality Starts is a step in the right direction to give a better measure of pitcher’s individual performance (as a "counting stat" that can be accumulated). The only problem is that Quality Starts is almost as bad as wins. It is defined by six or more innings pitched with 3 or fewer runs allowed. 6 innings pitched, 3 runs is a 4.50 ERA. 9 innings pitched, 4 runs is a 4.00 ERA. The first is a quality start, the second is not. There is no real rhyme or reason as to why this exists. It’s almost as bad as wins, but not quite.
Statistics aren’t a perfect measure of what happened on the field, especially ones that were developed to give snapshots of games to people reading about them in newspapers 100 years ago. There are some good alternatives out there, with baseball-reference and fangraphs both doing work in advanced statistics, which are good, quick references for better statistics. I’ll go into those, demystifying it, in a future post. For now, though, I’ll step off my soapbox.
Words: 1,342
Remaining: 338,494
No comments:
Post a Comment