Well, the baseball season is officially three weeks old. I haven’t written anything for two straight months, but dry spells are a part of life. Lets get back to writing.
This week, I want to look at advanced statistics. As a General Manager, it is becoming more and more important to understand advanced statistics and how they can help your organization win games and draw fans. Advanced Statistics have a place in every major sport from golf to basketball. Baseball is completely consumed by advanced performance statistics. Basketball is rapidly turning to statistics to back up traditional analysis, but baseball is absolutely obsessed with numbers. And they work. Nerdy numbers begotten from complicated formulas are a fantastic way of evaluating player performance. In this article, I want to look at one of the more important evaluator statistics in baseball.
Like I said, baseball loves them some numbers. One of the statistics that I particularly like for pitchers is Quality Starts. A quality start is defined as a start in which a pitcher throws at least 6 innings and gives up no more than 3 runs. Many baseball analysts will tell you that wins and losses is a very misleading number to count on. A pitcher could win 15 games and still have an awful ERA, a poor WHIP, and merely have had exceptional run support when they were pitching. If you can find pitchers that throw more quality starts than non-quality, then you can be that much closer to having a team that competes every night.
Favorite batting statistic? Are you prepared to throw up?
Now, I don’t expect you to understand that equation, and I really really don’t, but it is the equation to find Runs Created. Runs Created is the measure of how many runs a player contributes to their team. Bill James, one of the masters of sabermetric stats, created this equation because he said that “With regard to an offensive player, the first key question is how many runs have resulted from what he has done with the bat and on the basepaths.” This makes sense to me. Players that score runs and drive in runs are very important to a teams overall success.
