You're a damn fool. What did we bring him here for, to steal bases? You probably think we were better off just keeping Gurriel. Jesus, what has happened to this place? Even when you prevent facts, people stick to their guns. It's akin to tribal politics. It's ridiculous on that kind of level.
Im fine with the Abreau signing. Im just telling you from an analytical perspective that the metric RBI per AB is meaningless. It ignores oppurtunity. Abreau should have a much better RBI per AB than previous years since our team should be giving him way more oppurtunity than those shitty white sox teams. Batting average or OPS with runners in scoring position would be better or probably some other metric i havent thought of.
I agree with you on everything except batting average. That stat needs to go away. Just like "game winning RBI" did. It's just as flawed as "RBI per AB" because it ignores or sometimes penalizes productive results.
RISP BA: .268 OPS: .898 RISP and 2 outs BA: .403 OPS: 1.236 being late in our batting order, with the guys in front of him, these are some great numbers going into playoffs. Pretty clutch.
game winning RBI was a stat for how long? It wasn’t long. That stat was introduced in like ‘85 or ‘86. Batting Average is a stat that has been at the forefront of the game for well over 120 years. Yes, it’s antiquated in todays game but it’s definitely a more telling stat than gw rbi was. When I was a kid, batting Avg and counting stats were everything. Slugging % was also popular and on base % was hardly looked at by kids in the 80’s.
Without batting average Altuve would have never won the MVP in 2017 over Judge. There's a reason why the .400 mark hasn't been done since 1941 and that's because it's HARD to get hits. The most important stat in baseball should be a player getting on base as this keeps innings going and puts added pressure on the pitchers. If all anyone did was hit HRs then you wouldn't score more than 1 run each time. You need people to get on base first for that blast to really impact the game in a hurry. But let me agree with you that BA doesn't always tell the tell. It's situational like any other stat. The best tell for a team and a player would be clutch BA stats. How often does the player get on base to extend an inning and with RISP. That tells me more of how a player would react in the playoffs when the game is on the line than just general BA.
With a regular overall batting average below .235 I'm not sure how he didn't automatically realize that Abreu has been clutch when it matters most.
It has nothing to do with being new and geeky. It's simply incomplete and ignores important info Example. Alex Bregman is 47th in BA and 15th in OB% Would you consider him closer to the 47th or 15th best hitter in MLB?
Dude, literally every stat is incomplete and ignores important info. Even WAR. And baseball stats are more like pseudo-statistics anyway. I mean, we actually use a stat called OPS, where somebody was like, "maybe we should just add these together??" It's the most unstatistical way to weirdly reweight particular basic stats
Yes but BA actually has a stat that does nothing but fix its deficiency and nothing else. A player get 0 credit for a walk or HBP in BA. Why wouldn't you use a stat that corrects that without changing anything else? Absolutely no logical reason
The verb batting literally means the act of hitting the ball. So walks and HBP aren't part of that. So what's the actual problem?
Nothing. BA is exactly what it claims to be. It's simply archaic and inferior It's like "Wins" for a pitcher- nothing wrong with it except it only considers part of the story.
It is certainly an important skill for a batter, but the inability for a P to throw a good pitch should have no influence on a stat intended to represent a batter's ability to bat the ball. Or are you suggesting that walks should count towards an AB?
BA is still cool. It always did separate the good hitters from the rest of the pack. The all or nothing hitters of that time were not walking like they do now. An all or nothing hitter who doesn’t walk won’t last long in todays game. In a time when the main objective was to put the ball in play, BA was an important stat. Absolutely not accurate in determining a players overall offensive value but I’m not sure it was ever used for that. Tony Gwynn had a higher batting average than most every year because he was better than most at making contact and putting it in play. That leads to more hits. He had a skill that most didn’t have and it was tangible in his BA vs others. Wade Boggs would hit .350 but also walked 120 times. That was truly amazing. Hits are still better than walks in some scenarios. Batting average over a small sample means nothing but year after year it does tell a story and it does assign value. Most likely because of my age, I would feel like something was missing or wrong if they took BA away. If I was born in 1995, maybe I wouldn't have an attachment to that stat.
I was born in 1970 and deciding to ignore BA in favor of OBP was one of the "new school" thoughts I agreed with early on. Probably because my favorite player as a young adult (after the exodus) was Jeff Bagwell.
