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Friday, November 19, 2010
Three wishes for your sabre genie
Guy wrote:
It would be interesting to make a wish list of what we all wish the baseball writers knew that they mostly don’t know now. If you had to limit it to 3 ideas (and not so broadly drawn that it incorporates all saber ideas), what would they be? Before this week, I think all of us would have put “ignore wins and losses” in our top three, maybe even ranking it 1st. I would think about progress in those terms.
Fantastic idea! What I wish baseball writers knew:
1. Pitcher seasons won-loss records are so polluted with teammates influence that they should be discarded
2. A batter’s batting average tells you almost nothing after you already have OBP and SLG, so only reference it in the most specific of cases
3. A batter’s RBI total is heavily influenced by batting order and teammates, that you can instead focus on OBP and SLG with men on base instead to get a better indicator
The end-result of these three things is that the “three stats” to show for pitchers and batters is:
ERA, IP/GS, K minus BB per batter faced
OBP, SLG, ??
(That last one is subject to discussion. Right now, all I’ve got is SB.)