Sports Statistics 101: Baseball Basics

I've decided that every Friday, I'm going to post a blog explaining sports statistics. My reasoning for this is that I feel like a barrier to entry into sports fandom is there is a lot of numbers that can feel intimidating. I would love to mitigate that intimidation for people, so if you're someone who is starting to enjoy sports and would love to understand the numbers you see more, these are going to be for you. I decided to start with the basics of baseball because we are getting very close to playoff time and that always seems like the time where people get most into a sport. I would also like to point out that this first blog is about basic numbers so I apologize to all the sabermetrics fans out there but we will not be getting into things like BABIP and SIERA, that is for another time, in this blog we will just be talking about the numbers you are likely to see on your standard baseball broadcast. With the intros out of the way, lets start with some batting numbers first.

AVG: this is simply a players batting average, essentially how many times does a player get a hit. Batting Average is always shown as a decimal with the highest possible average being 1.000. The MLB average last season was .244 and is down ever so slightly so far this year to .243. It is worth noting that batting average has been on a steady decline since the 90s where the league hitting average was around .270. Batting average as for the most part is not thought of as the greatest counting stat which I will explain in a bit with some of the other stats, despite that someone who hits .300 is obviously quite a good hitter.

OBP: OBP stands for On Base Percentage. OBP is a stat that tells how many times you reach base. It adds up your Hits, Walks and Hit by Pitches to give you a nice tidy number that tells how often you reach base. OBP is another thing that has declined a bit since the hitters paradise that was the 90s but that is going to be true for almost all the batting stats we are going to talk about today. MLB average for OBP this year is .312 down a little from the .317 average last season. OBP is considered a stronger stat than AVG because generally a walk forces more pitches out of the starting pitcher and is the same amount of bases as a single so on a whole is considered a better outcome than a base hit. As far as "counting stats" go there is one that is considered a really good indicator of how good a hitter is and OBP is a big part of it but there is one more number we need before we get to it.

SLG: This is slugging percentage, this is the equation to calculate slugging percentage (1B + 2Bx2 + 3Bx3 + HRx4)/AB. That looks complicated but it is actually quite simple. If a player hits a single that is just worth one hit, if a player hits a double, that's worth 2 hits, triples are worth 3 and home runs are worth 4. So a guy who has 4 at bats and hits a single in 4 at bats has a slugging percentage of .250 however if a hitter hits a homerun in the same number of at bats has a slugging percentage of 1.000. Trying to calculate a slugging percentage is difficult and makes it sound complicate but really it just means the higher your number is, the better your hits are.

OPS: OPS stands for On Base + Slugging and after the complicated equation of slugging percentage you will be happy to know that the equation for finding OPS is quite simple, OBP + SLG. OPS is considered the best of the "counting stats" to many people because it not only tells how many times a hitter reach base but also tells you how valuable the hits a hitter gets are. League average OPS this season is .708 which is a massive jump down from the .728 that it was at last season. If you are an elite hitter an OPS in the .900s is a number you should expect and a bad hitter will probably be somewhere in the .600 and below range.

These are the kind of stats that you will see when a TV broadcast is showing a baseball game. They are the standard of basic hitting stats that most broadcasts will talk about when they show a game. Now lets go over some basic pitching stats.

ERA: This is the standard of judging a pitcher in basic statistics. ERA (earned run average) tells you how many earned runs score while you are pitching. ERA is a stat that breaks down as number of earned runs that score per 9 innings. So a pitcher who gives up 3 earned runs in 3 innings has an ERA of 9.00. Unlike the batting stats we have talked about, ERA is down a substantial amount this year at 3.98, the first time the MLB average ERA has been under 4 since 2015. While ERA is a good tool to see how good a pitcher is pitching, there is a slight issue, that is that ERA can also be dependent on how good the defence behind the pitcher is. If a team plays a great defence behind the pitcher they can take runs off the board and (despite the fact that a run that scores because of an error is unearned and therefor does not count against ERA) if a team is not making the big defensive plays behind the pitcher, that will cause an ERA to balloon. Because of this there is a metric that has been used more and more recently to determine the strength of a pitcher.

FIP: FIP stands for Fielding Independent Pitching, in essence it tells how a pitcher has pitched if the defence never plays a factor. The only things that calculate in FIP is Walks, Hit Batters, Home Runs and Strikeouts. FIP is by far the most advanced stat I am talking about today however I think in the modern game especially, FIP is talked about more and more as a major stat and I figured I would include it in this conversation after ERA. FIP and ERA numbers mirror each other so much like ERA, a FIP in the high 2 - low 3 range is elite while a FIP in the 5 and higher range is quite bad. I won't talk too much about FIP calculations because it is a whole equation that is confusing and most people will never use but FIP is an important number to help with the understanding of how good a pitcher is. As far as judging a pitcher goes FIP is a stronger tool than ERA.

WHIP: This stands for Walks + Hits per Innings Pitched. Long name, simple statistic, you give up 3 walks and 6 hits in 9 innings, your WHIP is 1.000. The MLB average WHIP is 1.270 and any WHIP near the 1.000 mark is the elite mark of MLB pitchers. Any pitcher with a WHIP north of 1.750 is going to have problems putting his team in positions to win ball games.

This has been a very numbers heavy blog but I also hope that it helps someone the next time they are watching a ball game and all the numbers show up on screen. I don't think stats are necessary to the enjoyment of the game but I can also understand how when commentators start throwing out a ton of numbers, it can be very intimidating. Hopefully this little article helps to supplement someone's enjoyment of baseball and feel more apart of the club. Next week, we will dive a little deeper down the rabbit hole of baseball stats and talk a little about micro stats and sabermetrics and all the underlying stuff that you really don't need to enjoy the game but if you are a stat head (like me) are very fascinating nuggets of information.