Baseball's Statistical Overload

Baseball is a historical game of statistics. No other sport wraps the past and the present together with a warm blanket of numbers like baseball does.

Unfortunately, over the last the last few years that blanket has become suffocating.

Computer-crazed statisticians are digging up too much irrelevant data and creating confusing new statistical categories. TV announcers love to read off the stats which leave my head spinning under the avalanche of information.

The irrelevant information overload is amped up during national telecasts. ESPN spits out more stats than today’s players emit tobacco juice. The other day I learned that rookie phenom Mike Trout is hitting .411 on pitches in the bottom third of the strike zone. And since he’s hitting over .350 he’s probably doing quite well on pitches in the middle and top third of the strike zone too. Then I was told that Josh Hamilton misses hitting the ball on 36 percent of his swings. The other 64 percent of his swings usually send the ball over the fence for a home run.

Speaking of home runs, I’ve always been curious as to how they accurately measure their distances. Homers rarely complete their travels. And there isn’t a guy out there with a tape measure like a judge at the Olympics marking the distance of the javelin throwers. So, EPSN was able to tell me that Mark Trumbo has the best average home run distance, at 418 feet. Then ESPN went one crazy detail further. Now they are measuring the speed of the home runs. Torii Hunter and Trumbo have the top two homer speeds at 107.5 and 107.3 mph respectively. I don’t care. It’s just technology overkill.

Thankfully, once in awhile a useful tidbit of data is revealed that prevents me from hitting the mute button. For example, ESPN said that Trout is the first player ever to get 100 hits, 15 homers, and 30 stolen bases in his first 75 career games. Additionally, nobody has ever hit .340 with 20 homers and 40 steals in a season, as Trout is on pace to do. Now there’s info that tells me something by comparing his numbers to the historical greats of the game.

There has also been an onslaught of new statistical categories. One of them is OPS which stands for “on base percentage plus slugging percentage”.  This category is supposed to be a better gauge of a hitter’s productivity. In the past, we judged a hitter on his batting average, homeruns, and RBI. Now with OPS, we can take into account how often he is getting on base and how many bases he is accruing with each hit. The trouble with OPS is that I never know how it compares. I don’t have the great OPS numbers of history lodged in my memory like I do with batting average, homers, and RBI. I have to look up the top OPS stats to get an idea. It’s too much work.

Then there’s WHIP, which apparently is like OPS for pitchers. This one is figured by dividing a pitcher’s walks and hits by his innings pitched. Again, as with OPS, I don’t relate to WHIP number because the all-time top WHIPs haven’t been passed down to me over time. A pitcher’s ERA is all I need to know if he’s good or not.

The most confusing new stat is WAR, or “wins above replacement”. WAR is supposed to show how many more wins a player would give his team over a replacement minor league or a substitute player. WAR can be calculated for pitchers and hitters. Good luck if you want to understand how WAR is actually figured. Looking at the stats, there are only three household names in the top 20 single-season WAR leaders: Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson, and Dwight Gooden. The other names on the list played in the 1800s. Does this mean that the players back then were better? Or maybe the replacement players weren’t so good. I have no idea. The career WAR leader board looks like a list of Hall of Fame members. So WAR is correct in telling us that the great players of history were actually just that, great. Thanks for the newsflash.

All of these new categories can be dissected at the mother-load of all stat websites, baseball-reference.com. The best thing this site does is it connects today’s players with those from history. For example, say you want to see how Chipper Jones stacks up against the best of the best. Plug his name in and baseball-reference.com will give you the players most similar to him based on their career stats. Four of the top 10 names on list are Hall of Famers. A few others have a chance to get in too. Chipper looks like a lock for Cooperstown.

That’s the kind of information I want to hear during a telecast. Don’t try to blow me away with numbers based on hyped-up technology. Instead, keep the announcing moving forward by connecting the present with the past.