What "sabermetric" stats are most important?

[GAC8666]

What "sabermetric" stats are most important to your fantasy team? What do you look at most for pitchers or batters not the tradtional stats like WHIP ERA k/9 BA OPS OBP SLG etc etc.

[Neato Torpedo]

Depends what you're looking for. If you're looking at how well a pitcher or batter performed, the best stats are wOBA (hitters) and SIERA (pitchers). If you're trying to predict outcome, SIERA is also good. But if you're trying to predict performance* you can't possibly use a single stat. You need to look at trends, like velocity, swinging strike rate, etc. For hitters, a change in FB% and an increase in HR could support a hypothesis that a player has changed his swing to make it more of a "home run swing". So basically, wOBA and SIERA are the best way to measure past performance, but to predict the future there is no one stat you can use. You have to look at the big picture.

*performance is different from outcome in that outcome is what actually happens while performance is what that one player did isolated from any external factors, e.g. wins is an outcome stat and ERA is its conjugate performance stat; ERA is an outcome stat and SIERA is its conjugate performance stat. Basically the outcome stat is explained by performance stat + fudge factors like team defense or run support.

[BronXBombers51]

Is there a good article(s) that anyone would recommend that really outline some of the major saber stats and what they do, what they're good at, what the cons are, etc.?

If not maybe someone could put something like this together for the Cafe. I'd definitely get a lot of use out of it.

[GAC8666]

I have been doing a lot of reading on Fangraphs. They have a good "dictionary" of most of the sabermetric stats and a break down of what they do and how you calculate them.

http://www.fangraphs.com/library/index.php/offense/obp/