Baseball statistics newbie!
March 15, 2006 10:19 AM 
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Help me find statistical benchmarks for sabermetric baseball stats.
I run a website that’s about the successes and, more accurately, shortcomings of a baseball team. I have loved baseball since I was about 6, but I am not a stats guy. I am reasonably proficient at understanding common statistics and placing them in context, however, I do not possess (but am trying to gain) the knowledge to contextualize a lot of the sabermetric stats that are out there, without some assistance.
So, with that in mind, my question is, is there somewhere on teh interwebs where I can find a definition of what a “good” value is for a given statistic? Baseball Prospectus and Hardball Times both have exhaustive glossaries, and they even get into how stats are calculated, which is very helpful. But a glossary’s not quite what I’m looking for – I’m looking for easily grasped benchmarks.
To greatly oversimplify, I know from my years of watching baseball that 18 or more wins in a year is a good year for a pitcher, or that .300 or better is a great year for a batter; what I don’t know is what would typically be considered a “good” OPS, K/BB rate, and so on. Any ideas as to where I could find such a thing?
posted by pdb to sports, hobbies, & recreation (5 comments total)
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to me, an average OPS is in the .700 range. An OPS of .800 is good, .900 is great, and 1.000+ is sublime. but when you're looking at OPS, it's often more helpful to break out what the OBP and SLG are. an OBP of .350+ is generally considered good, with .400+ being the ideal. a SLG higher than .450+ is good, and .550+ being ideal.
as a benchmark, for K/BB, i would say that for a pitcher to succeed, they generally need their strikeouts to outweigh their walks. a strikeout, in essence, is a measure of your "stuff"; BP has done some good research demonstrating that, while the hits a pitcher gives up is determined by their ability in part, a great deal of that is luck. (Greg Maddux has had some years where he's given up a lot of hits, for example; more than his usual.) hits depend on the defense behind you, and sometimes the ball just falls where they ain't, but strikeouts are a measure of the one thing a pitcher CAN control, directly, with his stuff: making the batter swing and miss. walks, alternately, are a measure of a pitcher's control: as direct as a strikeout. a pitcher with a lot of strikeouts and a lot of walks (e.g. a kerry wood) probably has great stuff, but doesn't have great command of it either; and his lack of command helps to cancel out his stuff, and that story is told in how his K/BB ratio isn't as great as you might expect when you see a guy with his kind of arm.
this is getting long-winded, so i'd better wrap up.
what i'm driving at, here, is that the benchmarks you want can be pretty intuitive once you understand the mechanics behind a player's stats. a player who K's a lot doesn't necessarily have a bad batting eye, but those Ks do indicate a player who swings all-or-nothing. The batting eye is indicated more by a positional player's strikeout-to-walk ratio, 1:1 being ideal. you can even paint a picture from the Ks and the BBs; a player who has a 1:1 ratio, but Ks a lot, has a swing that needs to start pretty early, and probably gets its power from the whole body. a player with low Ks probably gets his power from quick wrists and natural batting speed. a player with high BBs probably sees pitches pretty well, and is patient enough to wait for his pitch; with low BBs, fairly impatient. none of these traits are good or bad, in themselves, but together as a ratio do act as a benchmark.
posted by moz at 11:02 AM on March 15, 2006