THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Secondary Average highlights a Bill James strength—he wants to output a player’s sabermetric technoperformance into something that others can understand. Secondary Average is great at this, since any fan understands Batting Average.

My parents are no saberists, but they intuitively understood that getting on base was more important than batting average and told me so from a young age. That said, I think the gateway drug to sabermetrics is one of OBP or OPS. It’s easy to recognize that both are much better options than AVG (unless you’re being stubborn about it), and yet it doesn’t take long to realize that both suffer from considerable flaws. It’s not a long journey to linear weights from there, although for me, there was a considerable timelag between when I started using linear weights based stats and when I bothered to look into what linear weights are.