The age of (complaining about) analytics has long brought its fair share of controversy to the Major League Baseball conversation, but what I will kindly say to anyone who refuses to acknowledge the era of baseball that we’re in is that for fans, stats are meant to keep that conversation chugging along. To breed life into baseball is to be pedantic about its numbers, and if some of those numbers have become more recently acceptable than others, so be it! Regardless of what old crotchety folks might say about the new stuff or what sabermatricians will say about batting average, lots of stats hold a special place in my heart. The following is a list of five of them!
On-base percentage
I’ve talked about the beauty of on-base percentage before on Baseball with Matt 2.0, but to reiterate, the uniqueness of this stat is that its inverse is just as important as the stat itself. In other words, OBP is the rate at which a hitter gets on base, whereas 1-OBP would be an “outs percentage” of sorts. Outs are a commodity in baseball as time is a commodity in other sports. If you have more outs on the diamond, that’s more opportunities to score runs. It’s a fun interpretation of an otherwise plain stat that only became popular because of Michael Lewis, Brad Pitt, and Jonah Hill. When I point to you, you speak.
Whiff rate
This stat goes for hitters and pitchers because it represents the best/worst thing to happen on a ballfield: a swing and a miss. Hitters with high whiff rates strike out a lot and just swing at the wrong pitches entirely, but pitchers with high whiff rates are some of the master throwers of a generation. As with most baseball stats, whiff rate can be spliced up depending on the count, pitch type, pitch location, and so on, making it a telling stat when reading the fine print. It’s not the most critical stat in baseball, but of the ones that wouldn’t generally enter that conversation, it’s one of the most underrated.
Hard-hit rate (the rate at which batted balls are hit at or above a 95-mph exit velocity)
Hit the ball hard and good things will happen, right? Well, not everyone on Twitter would say that, even though the evidence and the logic are perfectly obvious. 95 miles-per-hour happens to be a great benchmark to use for this type of stat, as shown by the graph below. That type of benchmark isn’t always so clear when it comes to these types of really advanced stats that you can’t track during recess, but that just makes the stat easy to understand in a Major League Baseball game. Hitters are always trying to get good wood on the ball, while pitchers are trying to prevent it. What’s so controversial about hard-hit rate?
Running speed
As someone who watches Giancarlo Stanton on the regular, yes, the speed at which a player can round the bases is important. Speed is a pretty cheap asset in baseball, but with the rule changes leading to an increase in stolen base attempts, it’s an asset that is getting more valuable by the month. Eventually, most of Major League Baseball will be speed demons to catch up to the times because with the way the game is going, we’ll have 100+ single-season base stealers by the beginning of the next decade, and I can’t wait to see that.
ERA
Even though batting average wins MVPs (one of my many baseball mantras), it’s earned run average that has lasted the test of time as baseball’s best catch-all stat. The ERA title is way more indicative of CY Young winners nowadays as compared to wins or even strikeouts. It’s just an overall measurement of a pitcher’s efficiency. Sure, there are faults to it like any other “original” stat, but there aren’t as many faults as, say, a stat like runs batted in for hitters. It’s just a simple stat that explains the value of a pitcher in concise terms. I love it!
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