When I first started following Major League Baseball some twenty years ago, it was relatively easy to “know” the game—or at least feign an adequate understanding. Daily newspapers [remember those?] would print the scores from the previous night of games, so long as a game didn’t finish too late for the printing deadline. Along with those scores, the sports sections would run the current standings and the top 5-10 players in the American and National leagues in batting average, home runs, RBI, steals, wins, Ks, and saves. As long as you spent a few minutes every morning over breakfast reading this information, you would be able to carry a legitimate conversation about baseball with just about anyone.
To put it mildly, times have changed. Due to the growth of sabermetrics, coupled with the Internet’s ability to circulate such advanced metrics not just to baseball insiders and wonks but to the masses as well, gone are the days where simply being able to identify the ’90s Braves pitching rotation by name would impress your buddies at Happy Hour.
We live in a world where Detroit Tigers 1B Miguel Cabrera can lead his league in home runs, RBI, and batting average—thereby securing the “Triple Crown,” accomplished just 17 times—and still demonstrably have a less successful season than Los Angeles Angels CF Mike Trout. Unless your father is Billy Beane, it’s likely not your daddy’s American pastime anymore. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t know baseball without devoting 8 hours per day to film study and Microsoft Excel-aided quantitative analyses.
In college, students can major in Philosophy and consequently spend four years [and a subsequent lifetime of poverty and debt] pondering the meaning of life—or at the very least get really good at Beer Pong and cram the teachings of dead philosophers into their respective very short term memories. I forget if it was Voltaire or Immanuel Kant who said that the meaning of life is to not sound like an idiot during conversations, but whoever said it was almost assuredly correct. And conveniently, it takes surprisingly little time commitment to sound both knowledgeable and credible when discussing MLB.
A dirty little secret about following baseball is—to a greater extent than the NBA, NHL, or NFL—you can really understand what is going on across both Leagues without ever watching a game over the course of a season. It takes at most a half hour to go through the nightly box scores of every game played. If you invest 15-30 minutes per day studying those box scores, as the season progresses you will start to notice statistical trends indicating the quality and consistently of virtually all everyday players. You will begin to appreciate Cincinnati Reds 1B Joey Votto’s quiet dominance—oh look, Votto just went 1-3 with two walks and a run scored, again. You will begin to respect the abilities of workhorse starting pitchers like Bronson Arroyo of the Arizona Diamondbacks and Hisashi Iwakuma of the Seattle Mariners—hey, do those guys ever throw fewer than seven innings during a start? And most frustrating of all, you will almost assuredly get suckered into believing that free agent Vernon Wells is going to have a productive season—he’s bound to get signed at some point and go on a three week tear, right?
To be sure, box scores are quick, easy, and incredibly informative, but they only tell part of the analytical story. Conveniently, the part of the story they tell is the antiquated one; the one where Miguel Cabrera is a better baseball player than Mike Trout. A default ESPN box score provides batting statistics for ABs, R, H, RBI, BB, SO, AVG, OBP, and SLG, and pitching statistics for IP, H, R, ER, BB, SO, HR, PC-ST, and ERA. While these are all important numbers to pay attention to, sabermetrics can provide fans with much more useful information. Seemingly every year, new and useful baseball statistics are created, and it can be difficult to keep track of them all—let alone gauge their comparative utility. Fangraphs.com is a fantastic starting point for any quantitative baseball research, but in the mean time, there are five advanced statistics you should keep track of throughout the season to supplement your daily box score analysis: (1) WAR; (2) BABIP (3) Cost of a Win; (4) DRS/UZR (5) xFIP.
WAR stands for wins above replacement. It is effectively a statistic that combines a batter’s hitting, fielding, base running, and positional value to attempt to quantify that batter’s overall value [while one can quantify WAR for pitchers, xFIP is probably the better tool for such a metric]. The way WAR works is relatively simple: a replacement player, or a “scrub” so to speak, has a WAR value of 0. An average MLB player has a WAR value of around 2—meaning that playing him will gain his team two wins over playing the replacement player. The higher the WAR, the better the player. WAR, however, is not without problems. The defensive component to the formula is based on estimates, and such estimates aside, different statisticians utilize slightly different formulas to quantify war. Nevertheless, it is almost a necessary statistic to know and appreciate in 2014.
BABIP stands for batting average on balls in play. BABIP is just a measurement of the BA against a pitcher or for a hitter on any ball put in play that is not a home run. As explained by Grantland’s Jonah Keri, “The theory is that by examining BABIP numbers — especially those that deviate from the 2013 MLB average of .297 — we can identify aberrant performances by hitters and pitchers and adjust future expectations accordingly. It is generally accepted that hitters have more control over BABIP results than do pitchers, who are largely at the mercy of their defense and, in some cases, ballpark effects.”
Cost of a win is a nifty statistic that puts a price tag on a free agent’s WAR. In other words, assuming you buy into the usefulness of WAR, a general manager can begin to make personnel moves based in part on finding the cheapest players on the open market who will provide the greatest number of added wins to the team. Currently, it is generally accepted that a win on the open market costs $6 million dollars. That is to say, when Mike Trout makes $33.25 million in 2020, ignoring inflation, Trout would need to tally a WAR of over 5.5 for the Angels to get their money’s worth. Considering Trout has put up two straight 10+ WAR seasons, the Angels should be getting a bargain. Nice work, Arte Moreno.
DRS and UZR stand for defensive runs saved and ultimate zone rating, respectively. These metrics are for defensive purposes. They attempt to quantify defensive contributions based on ground covered and plays made— not just classic statistics as errors and outfield assists. These statistics suffer when a sample size is small, so they are best observed over a couple different seasons as opposed to, say, just 2014.
Finally, xFIP stands for adjusted fielding independent pitching. As explained again by Keri, “xFIP also adjusts a pitcher’s line to regress his home run rate toward league average. The theory behind xFIP is that sometimes pitchers will allow more (or fewer) home runs per fly ball than league norms might suggest. By regressing that number toward the mean, you’re supposedly stripping out statistical noise to get a clearer picture of how many runs a pitcher would’ve allowed under more typical circumstances.”
In 2014, fans of professional baseball now know more than ever, and it is far too easy to inadvertently become ignorant to the latest trends and narratives around Major League Baseball. By taking 20 minutes a day to study the nightly box scores while at least being cognizant about such things as WAR and xFIP, however, you will easily be able to talk all the baseball you want with your friends without sounding oblivious to the sport.