From: roger@crux.Princeton.EDU (Roger Lustig)
Newsgroups: rec.sport.baseball
Subject: Re: Lies, Damn Lies, & Statistics (was Re: The Monthly Cecil Fielder Thread
Date: 3 Sep 92 02:05:46 GMT
Reply-To: roger@astro.princeton.edu (Roger Lustig)
Organization: Princeton University
Originator: news@nimaster

In article <1992Sep02.204409.2123@brtph560.bnr.ca> psycho@brtpa25.bnr.ca (Paul Jezioranski) writes:
>Since we've all gone into gory detail about how much better Tony
>Phillips, Lou Whitaker, and Mickey Tettleton are than Cecil Fielder, I
>thought I'd delve into another issue.

>I brought up the example of using opposing pitcher's ERA in the
>RBI/PA/RISP equation to illustrate that these statistics are getting
>absurd. 

"Oh.  Irony.  We don't do irony around here."

  (Steve Martin as C.D. Bailes in _Roxanne_)

Trouble is, what's absurd is RBI.  It awards a disproportionate
amount of the credit to one player, and robs other players of their share
in creating a run.  It clouds the issue of individual performance in
the context of a team sport.  

>If you are going to go into gory detail about each hitter than
>go all the way:

[panicky stuff deleted]

>Why don't we bemoan all of those RBI that Lou Gehrig had. Hell, Babe Ruth was
>batting in front of him most of the time. Let's yank him from the Hall of 
>Fame.

Because we know what else he did.  He reached base 4 times out of 10.  He
hit homers at a great rate.  He got hits and walks and doubles at a 
great rate.  Take away Gehrig's RBI number and the picture is the same.

This is not true of Fielder: this year, he reaches base *less* often 
than the average player, hits homers OK (while playing in a known homer
park), never gets triples, doesn't get many doubles, either.      

>Any statistic you can come up with is bound to be affected by countless "what
>ifs". Keep it simple. Games played, runs scored, hits, walks, RBI, etc. (i.e.
>the basics) give a solid idea of hitting performance. Sure there may be some
>misleading info, but many of the other stats you can present can also be
>equally as misleading.

OK: 

Fielder has played almost every game.  

He has scored a fair number of runs.

His hit total sucks.  (241 BA.)

He has made more outs than almost any other player in the league.

He has driven in many runs, but stranded many more.  

He doesn't have the doubles you'd expect of a hitter as good as he
supposedly is.  

He is very slow.  

He does not reach base very often (goes with the "many outs" of course.)

The trouble with R and RBI are quite simply thatthe player doesn't make
them himself, the way he makes H and AB and W and HR and 2B.  It's the 
result of a team effort, and Fielder happens to play behind a lot of 
really good on-basers.

Why do we have the other stats?  Not to mislead.  Most of us HATE the 
split stats you parodied; we know they're useless.  How do we know?  We
bothered to go out and check.  We found that righty-lefty matters, and
park matters, but that some factors (like late inning pressure and 
"clutch") do *not* create significant differences.  

The trouble with the ultra-simple stats like hits and homers is that
we can't compare them very well.  If a guy was injured for a month,
and you still want to know whether he's a good hitter in general, the
counting stats will mislead.  So we use rates like batting average.

Now, we've found that some things work better than batting average; 
on-base percentage and slugging average are two.  Fielder's SLG is 
pretty good; his OBA sucks bigtime.

That's all anyone complains about with Fielder.  Note that Tettleton's
SLG matches Fielder's this year, and his OBA is much higher.  

Roger
Newsgroups: rec.sport.baseball