Top 5 stats you can calculate in your head

[jollyschwa]

I'm bored at work and contemplating my love/hate relationship with sabremetrics. As much as I love WAR, ERA+ and all of their cousins (and I do), my favorite stats are still the ones that I can actually sense or at least easily calculate in my head.

My love for baseball is all about the aesthetics. Watching a ball leave the park, the strike 'em out throw 'em out, web gems, two outs in the bottom of the ninth and down by one with runners on second and third... never in my life have I witnessed these things and wondered how it would effect a guys WAR. To me WAR is like a shiny new car sitting in a lot. Looks nice, but what's under the hood?

Anyway, it got me wondering - what are the best "non-advanced" stats to evaluate talent? "Non-advanced" meaning there needs to be little to no calculation

Here's mine for pitchers and batters.

Pitchers
WHIP
Innings Pitched
K/9
HR/9
K/BB

Least favorite - Wins, possibly the worst stat in sports

Batters
HR
OPS
Runs
Total Bases
RBI - Overrated, I know, but I still love it the you'd love your child even though you know he isn't that bright or talented... at anything

Honorable Mention - SB - Definitely not an indicator of overall talent but I consider it an underrated stat. If you steal a lot of bases, it means you were on base a lot to begin with (and yeah, there are obvious exceptions to that). Plus, Rickey Henderson is my favorite non-Cub

Least favorite - This is tough because I actually think all hitter stats are pretty useful. But if I had to pick one it'd be the Sacrifice Fly. To me it really just means the guy either failed to hit it out of the park or just couldn't.

I'm curious what everyone else thinks.

[rpriske]

The 'in your head' thing aside, I have never understand the fascination with WHIP. It tells you very little. Why would you not used opp OPS (or equivalent offensive stat) instead?

If a pitcher has a WHIP of 1.00 but most of those hits are home runs he is a much worse pitcher than one with a WHIP of 1.25 if most of those hits are singles.

[NoOne]

Originally Posted by rpriske

The 'in your head' thing aside, I have never understand the fascination with WHIP. It tells you very little. Why would you not used opp OPS (or equivalent offensive stat) instead?

If a pitcher has a WHIP of 1.00 but most of those hits are home runs he is a much worse pitcher than one with a WHIP of 1.25 if most of those hits are singles.

I think you should have choosen something beside OPS. it's completely mis-weighted and misrepresents data. it makes no attempt to be realistic. someone arbitrarily added two stats together without any thought on the matter. (you said other offensive stats, too. don't think i am riding you. i just have a strong distaste for the logic behnd the creation of OPS)

opponents average/obp and WHIP are the exact same thing. they are just presented differently. if one is more intuitive for you, then that will be your preference.

whip could be improved by weighting walks differently than hits, relative to % chance of scoring runs. it has flaws, and most stats do whether traditional or newer.

your example of why it's not helpful is quite biased. it presupposes that you can only use whip without other information. no rational person would use whip as in your example. the point is to use a matrix of metrics to evaluate value in a consistent and objective manner. once you have consistency, you can make use of experience more efficiently.

so you wouldn't just compare whips between a 1.00 and a 1.25 pitcher. you'd look at hr/9 and such, too, which he mentions in the initial post as stats he likes for evaluating pitchers.

the metrics that are rates, as opposed to totals, will give you immensely more useful information.

so you use whip, hr/9 bb/9 h/9 etc. and nothing prevents you from also using avg/obp/slugging against, either. where info is lacking in one stat, you use another to fill in the blank. this isn't faith. absolute belief in any particular stat as being unfallible is not required. some stats have limitations. some only tell a portion of the story. by using more than 1 or 2, you can draw a much more accurate picture of reality.

derivative stats like WAR use those stats weighted in an agreed upon manner. the standard may or may not be the most precise method possible. this explains why they are not absolute figures, like hr/9. subjectivity and human error is involved. i do believe it will be refined into a better form in the future. until then, i trust my own weights more. i prefer to use the individual parts and go from there.

[NoOne]

Originally Posted by jollyschwa

I'm bored at work and contemplating my love/hate relationship with sabremetrics. As much as I love WAR, ERA+ and all of their cousins (and I do), my favorite stats are still the ones that I can actually sense or at least easily calculate in my head.

My love for baseball is all about the aesthetics. Watching a ball leave the park, the strike 'em out throw 'em out, web gems, two outs in the bottom of the ninth and down by one with runners on second and third... never in my life have I witnessed these things and wondered how it would effect a guys WAR. To me WAR is like a shiny new car sitting in a lot. Looks nice, but what's under the hood?

Anyway, it got me wondering - what are the best "non-advanced" stats to evaluate talent? "Non-advanced" meaning there needs to be little to no calculation

Here's mine for pitchers and batters.

Pitchers
WHIP
Innings Pitched
K/9
HR/9
K/BB

Least favorite - Wins, possibly the worst stat in sports

Batters
HR
OPS
Runs
Total Bases
RBI - Overrated, I know, but I still love it the you'd love your child even though you know he isn't that bright or talented... at anything

Honorable Mention - SB - Definitely not an indicator of overall talent but I consider it an underrated stat. If you steal a lot of bases, it means you were on base a lot to begin with (and yeah, there are obvious exceptions to that). Plus, Rickey Henderson is my favorite non-Cub

Least favorite - This is tough because I actually think all hitter stats are pretty useful. But if I had to pick one it'd be the Sacrifice Fly. To me it really just means the guy either failed to hit it out of the park or just couldn't.

I'm curious what everyone else thinks.

i like your preferences on pitchers, but we diverge on batters a bit. the same way how you look at pitchers and batters diverges.

i think ops was created by a mongoloid, lol. that's all i have to say on OPS.

you mention hr, i can only assume you also consider the rate at which they are hit as equally important as totals. position in lineup and success of your team greatly influences # of AB. totals can be deceiving in nature.

RBIs don't tell you much that is useful. however, the rate at which someone capitalizes on rbi opportunities tells you alot more.

runs have similar problem as RBI. a better way to look at it is how often a table setter gets on base and the likelihood of them scoring from 1st, 2nd, 3rd on various types of hits - 2 different aspects. the point is to eliminate what they cannot control from evaluation, if possible, and only evaluate them on what they actually directly do and control.

it's not their fault if they get on 40% of the time and the batter behind them goes 10-for-150 in those chances.

sb is fine as long as a player can maintain a certain % or higher. whatever the numbers say is the breakeven point or the point of diminishing returns etc etc.

i will use any rationally constructed statistic. when i use somethign liek ERA, i will also look at fielding efficiency and general defense of the team they were on. i don't trust FIP without knowing more about it.

how you describe SF is probably true for the more selfish player. team players will try to err on the side of a fly ball when the opportunity presents itself and 1 run is important (context!). like you, i don't think it's a terribly important stat, though. to few situations to be more important than even a few extra ticks of BA over 162 games - type idea. 1500sf a year league wide or somethign like that. not a common occurence to get up in a puff about if a player isn't good at it. even moreso with Sac hits

some stats are just poorly constructed or rely on subjective data collection. e.g. defensive zone rating is junk. ops is junk. just dividing putouts by opportunities is not very useful information because it is so blatantly incomplete. totals without knowledge of rate is not very useful when comparing players.