'Stats I Like'

[bigh0rt]

A long read, but really enjoyable.

Baserunning

As far as I know, Bill James is the first mainstream writer to really take on base running stats — in his Handbook every year, he breaks down base runners into a plus/minus system that is really a lot of fun. But what I want to talk about briefly here is how the numbers can give us a pretty good sense of how much speed means in baseball.

Let’s take perhaps the fastest runner in the American League — I’m saying Carl Crawford, though I see that Carlos Gomez is now telling everyone that HE’S the fastest (Advice: Score a few runs, kid, before yapping). And let’s take perhaps the slowest runner in the American League … Big Papi.*

*I realize that, technically, no player is slower than Bengie Molina — no LAND MASS is slower than Bengie Molina — but he was in the NL in 2007.

Joe Posnanski | FULL READ

[Ender]

Nice read, I personally think OPS+ and ERA+ are terrible stats so I disagree on those. The park factors are just not good enough and ERA+ suffers from all the same flaws as ERA. I do think people underrate baserunning and fielding, they are coming around on OBP lately which is a good thing.

His baserunning comments are a bit lacking, you need to look at more than two players. He should really read dan fox's blog for some more in depth numbers. If the best baserunner in baseball is +20 runs over the worst that is still +2 wins on average which is just huge since most people simply ignore it completely.