This post is more of a reference or an index than a real, honest-to-gosh sabermetrics-analyzing post.
For those of you who aren’t sure what statistics to use when evaluating a player, look no further than this post. Feel free to disagree, but I believe that these are categorized correctly.
Good stats are those that measure a player’s actual talent or skill level in a certain area. Bad stats don’t account for luck or other such factors that get in the way of understanding a player’s true underlying skills and ability.
Good stats – use these to evaluate how good or bad a baseball player is:
- FIP (Fielding independent pitching)
- tRA (Park-adjusted, defense-adjusted, ERA-like stat)
- wOBA (Weighted on-base average)
- OBP (On-base percentage)
- SLG (slugging percentage)
- BA (batting average, and this one is debatable)
- UZR (ultimate zone rating)
- K/9 (strikeouts per nine innings)
- H/9 (hits allowed per nine innings)
- BB/9 (walks allowed per nine innings)
- BBs (walks accrued by either a pitcher or batter)
- Ks (strikeouts accrued by either a pitcher or batter)
- LD% (percentage of line drives hit by a batter of his total balls hit in play)
- GB% and FB% (percentage of ground balls or fly balls either hit by a batter or induced by a pitcher. Remember, ground balls are better because they are more likely to turn into outs.)
Bad stats – don’t use these to evaluate players for their skills:
- ERA (Earned run average; you may as well look at total runs allowed if you’re going to go down this dark, dark path. ERA is decent over a career sample, but not over anything smaller than that.)
- WHIP (So incredibly dumb that I won’t bother to explain it)
- VORP (which is pretty much WAR for cavemen)
- Defensive errors (this measures sure-handedness rather than defensive ability, and it certainly doesn’t measure range.)
- Saves (anyone can be a closer)
- Win-loss record (you should know better; anyone can win a baseball game if their team scores enough runs. Even Carlos Silva.)
- RBI (runs batted in; this measures your team’s ability to get on base more than a player’s ability to hit with men on base)
So there you go. Most of the good stats are available on www.Fangraphs.com and www.Statcorner.com.
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You should throw wRC+ in there. OPS+, but better.
Oh, and I’d take K% over K/9 or K’s because K/9 can be affected by things like defense.
I guess I am really dumb. Why exactly is WHIP such a bad stat? Maybe not the most comprehensive stat out there, but you make it sound completely useless. Please explain.
WHIP isn’t necessarily any worse than stats like ERA, but it’s just not useful, because it has the same flaws. We already have BB/9, so the walk aspect is pretty redundant, and then there’s hits, which isn’t a particularly good way of measuring a pitcher (because it’s influenced by defense, luck, etc.) So, yeah, it’s pretty much useless.
Shenanigans! I call shenanigans. Ground balls do not result in outs more often. The opposite is true. Fly balls are more likely to be outs, but when they are hits, they are far more likely to be extra base hits, which is why they are worse. Ground ball pitchers are better than fly ball pitchers for this reason. They keep the ball in the park and don’t give up extra base hits.
I was young and stupid then, Nate! What did I know?