About The Specific Baseball Measures We UseThe Standard Baseball MeasuresSeveral of the calculated measures are standard in baseball and--presumably--already familiar to you. For batters, "PA" is simply total Plate Appearances--the total of at-bats, walks, hit-by-pitch, and sacrifice flys (but, for our work here, not sacrifice bunts). The "BA" is the familiar Batting Average, the "SA" is the familiar Slugging Average, and the "OBA" is the familiar On-Base Average.For pitchers, "IP" and "ERA" are obvious; "K/W"--the strikeout-to-walk ratio--will also be familiar to many; it is shown here because it is often thought to be a barometer of pitching ability (an idea we find to be about half-true). Some Non-Standard Baseball MeasuresThe "HA" is an HBH stat--the "Hitting Average". It is similar to the BA, but the basis is all plate appearances, not just at-bats. It thus expresses the batter's actual likelihood of getting a hit in a particular appearance, which the Batting Average (one of the least useful of conventional stats) does not.The "PF" is the Power Factor; it is total bases divided by hits, or--put another way-- the average number of bases per hit by the batter. This number minus 1 is often called "isolated power"; in either format, it is a good measure of a batter's actual ability to drive a batted baseball (but with other things, like speed, in the mix). Power Factors run in well-established ranges: from 1.15 to 1.25 is the now-rare true "Judy" or "banjo" or "slap" hitter--the man who just gently pokes the ball over the infielders for a single, only very occasionally getting a double and almost never a home run. From 1.30 to 1.35 is the usual non-power-hitter value. From 1.5 up, we are dealing with sluggers (values from 1.35 to 1.50 are unusual, and when seen are often very slow runners who are getting singles where an even average runner would get doubles.) A value of 2.0 or above is rare even in a single season, and for a career was once (in the sunny days before the SillyBall) seen only once in a decade or so; nowadays, it is not that rare, but is still unusual. The "BBA", the BB Average, is simply the average rate at which the man takes walks (walks per plate appearance). The "TBA" is the "Total-Base Average": total bases per plate appearance. It stands to the Slugging Average as the Hitting Average does to the Batting Average, and is correspondingly more meaningful than the SA. A perhaps useful way to relate these measures to a baseball game you see before your eyes is this:
The TOP: Total Offensive ProductivityTo the extent that a man's total value to a team as a batter can be expressed in a single number (most analysts accept that it can) the TOP is HBH's rendition of such a number.Simply put, the TOP is the number of runs that would be scored in a full, normal-length season by a baseball line-up of nine men each an exact clone of the man being rated. There is an extended discussion of the TOP and baseball-analysis theory in general elsewhere on this site. Key* here is that the TOP is not a relative and thus subjective measure: it is an absolute measure, meaning that it has a demonstrable real-world application and possesses what scientists call "falsifiability"--in other words, its correctness can be tested and proved or disproved. It has been tested, thoroughly, and has not been falsified. (* If you're a sportscaster, that's very key .) One can thus, in principle, combine the TOPs of the men on an actual baseball team and make presumably useful and reasonably accurate predictions of how many runs that team will score. And indeed, subject to some qualification and technicalities, one can. The technicalities are these: first, one must of course weight the men's individual TOPs by their percentage of playing time; and second, for technical reasons, the team TOP will not be the simple average of even the weighted individual TOPs but will be a varying few percent lower ("the average of the means is not, in general, equal to the mean of the averages," for those who care). But otherwise, it does work. Its limitations as a means of projecting the final October standings on the morning of opening day are all associated with one variable: playing time. Men get injured or traded, managers get good or bad inspirations, and so on. One cannot get rich by going to a baseball sports book with these techniques, because one cannot project--even approximately--who, by season's end, will actually have played how much where. We are scientists, not thaumaturges. |
Measures calculated by High Boskage House Baseball Operations, using proprietary techniques.
All data soon will be (but is not yet) normalized for park effects and seasonal variations.
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Site Front Page Late Baseball-Site News and Thoughts |
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Daily Baseball Data: |
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Teams: |
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| Overall Team Performance Stats (win projections and more from actual quality of play to date) | ||
| Player Performance Stats, by Team | ||
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Batters: |
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| Batters by Last Name: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | ||
| Batters by Performance (a single all-batters list) | ||
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Batters by Positions Played:
alphabetically: C | 1B | 2B | SS | 3B | LF | CF | RF | DH | SP | RP by batting performance: C | 1B | 2B | SS | 3B | LF | CF | RF | DH | SP | RP |
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Pitchers: |
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| Pitchers by Last Name: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | ||
| Pitchers by Performance (a single all-pitchers list) | ||
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Pitchers by Role:
alphabetically: Starters | Relievers by pitching performance: Starters | Relievers |
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Other Statistical Data: |
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| "Regular" Players, Starting Pitchers, and Relief Pitchers, by Performance | ||
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Team
Defense (and its projected consequences)
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Baseball "White Papers"--meanings and explanations of the things on this site |
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General Background: |
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| For You Rookies: what this site is all about--what it is telling you about baseball, and how, and why | ||
| Some Baseball Analysis Theory: a semi-technical backgrounding on modern baseball analysis | ||
| Baseball Stat Definitions: the standard and the unique statistics we present here, defined | ||
| Baseball Data Normalization: how we correct for what, and why we need to | ||
| The "Quality of Pitching" Measures: why they are the best way to evaluate pitching performance | ||
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"Steroids":
why just about everything you think you know about them is wrong Now a site of its own! steroids-and-baseball.com (the link above gets you there) |
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| "The SillyBall": why baseball before and after 1993 is really two different games | ||
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About Particular Pages Here: |
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| The Team-Performance Table: there is a lot in that Table, and this explains what it all is | ||
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The Team-Defense
Table: how important defense is or isn't in baseball, and how to
correctly evaluate it
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Miscellaneous--but not unimportant |
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| About High Boskage House: who we are and why we might know what we're talking about regarding baseball | ||
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Links To A Select Few
Other Useful Baseball Sites (including those that link to this one)
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The High Boskage House Baseball Shop (which offers more than baseball books--in fact, more than just books) |
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What Makes This "Baseball Shop" Special: |
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| Finding Books About Baseball Topics: we've already done it for you, and our list is updated daily | ||
| Search For Any New Book at Amazon (which is, after all, the cheapest place to buy books new) | ||
| Search For Any Used Book at Abebooks (which is the easiest place on the internet to find any used book) | ||
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Search For Anything at
All at Amazon: nowadays, they're a lot more than just books
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| Baseball Books Available Today: | ||
| A Master Baseball-Books List (plain text your browser can easily "search") | ||
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Baseball Books By Title:
(because so many baseball book titles begin with the word "baseball", those are broken out separately in the title lists below) A | B | "Baseball" | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z | other |
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