Friday, October 18, 2013

You guys are back?!?!?!? Plus a Sabermetric lesson

Wait....What??  I know what you guys are thinking, I thought you said you were going to be on a different site??  Are you lying to us?  Can we ever trust you again??

Well my answer to this is that were are on Blogger and for now, we are here to stay (Usual call for a millionaire to give us a nice website).  And to all of you asking that last question, could you ever really trust us in the first place.

It was actually quite humbling as while we were gone, multiple people asked us why we stopped writing and where have we been??  People told us that they read every post and to that I say thank you and don't you have anything better to do with your time??  In all seriousness, keep reading as we come back with some more consistent content because while we definitely do this for self-fulfillment, we find it absolutely awesome that we have regular readers.  If you guys have any suggestions, feel free to share them and if we have a large enough viewership, we actually have some big ideas for the future.

While I know we missed probably the most excited couple months of the year, and as the season winds down and pushes toward the off-season, we are going to bring back what we originally started with and that is season reviews.  So look forward to reading about how your favorite team did in 2013.

As we have grown as fans, we have picked up on some awesome statistics and we want to share that with the rest of the baseball world, so for this years edition of reviews, we are going to start talking about some more advanced statistics.  Things like ISO, wOBA, OPS+, FIP, K%, BB%, and everyone's favorite WAR.  So what do all these statistics mean?? 

Fangraphs has some excellent information about what all these stats mean HERE.  For now, I will give you a quick explanation of what each of these stats mean

ISO-The measure of a hitter's ability to hit for extra bases.  ISO can be calculated by subtracting a hitters' batting average from their slugging percentage.  An average ISO is somewhere around .145, while an very good ISO is usually greater than .200.

wOBA-Weighted on base average weighs all the individual components of hitting based on their run value.  It is a more accurate measure of offensive value than batting average, slugging, and on-base average.  .320 is usually around league average for wOBA, while a number over .370 is considered very good.

BABIP-Batting average on balls in play measures how many of a players' balls put in play go for hits.  While BABIP can be flawed, it is usually a good measure of how "lucky" a player can be.  As a general rule of thumb, about 30% of balls put in play go for hits.  BABIP can be used to measure both hitter and pitcher success.

FIP-Fielding independent pitching factors in only things in which a pitcher can control, which includes walks, hit by pitches, strikeouts, and home runs.  FIP isn't a great metric for individual game performances and is better for larger samples like and entire year or multiple seasons.  It is seen as a better metric than ERA and league average FIP is usually around 4.00, while a good FIP is around 3.25 and under.

WAR-Wins above replacement is a metric that tells how valuable a player is to his team.  It basically tells how many wins a player provides for his team compared to a league average player.  Fangraphs and Baseball Reference both provide a WAR statistic which can be calculated differently, but both provide a good snapshot of how valuable a player is to his team.

Hope you learned something here today, thanks for coming back, enjoy some playoff baseball, and Go Tigers!!!  Although it was in a Red Sox win, I leave you with this....the picture of the postseason so far.


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