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Wednesday, September 02, 2009
The Poz challenge to simplicity
Joe Posnanski wants a simple metric he can sell/use:
I continue to look for an extremely simple one-stop-shopping stat that could replace OPS. I would LOVE to get behind one. Of course I love Base Runs because it’s so mind-boggling accurate, but it’s complicated*. Even simple runs created is a really good stat, obviously, but it just seems to scare people.
*Of course, so is passer rating and for some reason people cite that all the time.
...Maybe Eqa is the answer or WPA or VORP. Or maybe, as Bill James once said, an amateur like myself should just clear the floor. Tom, you got something simple for us?
First off, I have no problem with “amateurs” (whatever that means) dancing with me. In reality, I’m a below-average dancer, and my wife is an excellent dancer. As long as I am willing to learn and keep pace with her, then I deserve to be on the dance floor.
Joe wants to dance, and he wants to learn a good dance, without having to learn the Waltz or (uhhhh) Tango. (Sorry about that.) But, he also doesn’t want, I suppose, to learn the Macarena or the two-step. They’re fun, like OPS, but, you get sick of them at some point.
So, he’d like some new dance, a dance that we won’t get sick of, but also not a dance that is too complicated. He wants to be on the dance floor, and I want him there.
My proposal, so far, is wOBA because it keeps the principle of OBP and SLG alive (assigning a value for each base, and setting the denominator in terms of opportunities). Whereas SLG says a single is “1”, I say it “.9”. Where SLG says a HR is “4”, I say it’s “2”. Whereas SLG says a walk is nonexistant, I say it’s “.7”.
If you want to argue that batting average is the better scale than OBP, then I’m not onboard. Batting average is incredibly stupid, as one of Joe’s old blog posts described very well. I have no interest in that scale. Batting average is line dancing.
However, I haven’t given it much thought. I think it has to be a rate, or index of some kind. It can’t be a simple counting number, like Runs Created, because it does away with outs. RC/27 is ok, but it goes too far in terms of its implications. Perhaps another option is RC+, which would be RC/27 divided by the league runs per game. So, a guy with an RC/27 of 6 when the league scores 4 is 1.50 (or 150). OPS+ is very close to this (but it scr-ws up the individual values somewhat). Since only Sean Forman calculates OPS+ anyway, I see no problem in creating a better stat that only one person (be it Sean or Fangraphs or Hardball Times) that calculates it.
Remember though, we have history that shows how very difficult it is to get a stat into the mainstream. You have to respect that there are conditions to overcome.
What say you?