Completely improper use of a Venn Diagram

Baseball is a thinking man’s game. Presumably it’s been labeled as such not only because mental defectives make poor base runners, but because there’s a great deal of thought that goes into the actions of a single player. Fielders need to make decisions regarding where they’re throwing the ball depending on whether or not they can get the runner out, pitchers and catchers need to be on the same page about pitch locations and what to throw to beat the man at the dish, and the manager pulls it all together like an orchestral conductor who likes touching his ears, nose, and chin with his index finger.

But in reality, I think baseball was invented for one group of people – statisticians. Someone in a basement emerged one day, taking off his glasses, declaring that he figured out which team was best and would win the pennant, boldly shouting the word, “SCIENCE!”

Statistics are an ever present reality in all sports nowadays. Save, slugging, and down-conversion percentages; points, assists, and yards per game; batting average, all purpose yards, sacks, minutes on ice, you get the picture. Omnipresent panels and scrolling bottom bars bombard you with every number you could ever dream of having, most of it very useful. Which brings me to my least favorite stat ever.

OPS

This is a very simple number to compute, and its name says it all: On-Base plus Slugging . It combines the two percentages into a single, super statistic. Each of these two original stats stands on their own to feet and are quite useful. Slugging Percentage is a measure of how many total bases a hitter gets per at bat, with a maximum number of 4.000 (something Barry Bonds aimed for and went to great lengths to attempt). On-base Percentage is a self-explanatory statistic, it gives a percentage of the number of times a player would reach base per at bat, with a maximum number of 1.000 (again, Barry Bonds couldn’t find enough juice at a Tropicana distribution warehouse to make this happen). The digs at Bonds come from the fact that with a little help from some doctors, he achieved the highest slugging percentage ever recorded, and that offends me.

I wonder who came up with the idea of combining these two stats, because realistically it’s measuring the same thing twice more often than not. If a player reaches base safely, that ups his on-base percentage, and ups his slugging percentage, so naturally that’s reflected in his OPS from both sides of the equation. Naturally, these people must be enormous fans of the old adage “measure twice, cut once.” I’ve grown to be more of a fan of “never measure, cut with your mind” because it’s more fun to be dangerous than careful when dealing with woodworking.

Most everything I’ve read says that OPS is more of a measure of how well a hitter is doing rather than telling you hard-nosed facts that are based on science and mathematics. Instead, you’re supposed to judge a player’s OPS against other players and use it as a comparison. The wonderful people that have popularized this number have neglected the fact that on every panel that pops up under your favorite hitter when they come to the plate, they list a bevy of numbers for you already, and they can help you judge that person’s performance just fine: BAA, HR, RBI, and even SLG and OBP. Those have worked for years, why bother adding something else that merely combines two numbers you’re already throwing up there?

If ESPN, Fox, and the MLB want to combine SLG and OBP, why not take it all a few steps further? Let’s say we present a new number that gives a better, well-rounded measure of a player’s performance?

BAAHRRBI

As the heading says, we’ll be creating a new number called “Barbie,” read it quickly and it’ll make sense. It’s the perfect, quintessential number in all of sports. We’ll take the batting average and multiply it by 200 and round it to the nearest whole number, then add that to the hitter’s home run total, then add that to their runs batted in. Who needs to know the particulars of each of these antiquated statistics when you can have one number that conveys how your favorite player’s really doing in one easy-to-understand number? Jeter’s got an 86 Barbie, he’s having a horrendous year at the plate by his standards. Andre Ethier has a 127 Barbie and he’s going out of his mind on the DL because he can’t keep growing that tremendous Barbie number. Those numbers are clear cut measures of how a player is doing, just as relevant and silly as OPS, and I look forward to using it from here out as my one and only super stat.