Did you know my OPS is 1.140?
No, we didn’t. Thank you for enlightening us. That’s pretty cool… pretty cool.
Now what the fuck are you talking about?
Dan Johnson plays first base for the Oakland A’s, and OPS is On-base plus slugging, a baseball stat.
If that’s true than I… still… don’t… care…
Baseball statistics are probably some of the most esoteric and worthless statistics ever.
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Seconded.
So, wait, is OPS equal to batting average plus slugging average?
Edit: OK I looked it up, I confused batting average with on base percentage. On base percentage is a measure of good a player is at getting on base but it’s kind of weird, and then adding it together with slugging average is also weird.
That’s why baseball statistics are esoteric and worthless. Fucking SABRmetrics.
Since I’m a pinko commie unamerican woman who doesn’t give a crap about baseball, much less sports in general, I don’t care.
Yeah, your avatar shows how much of a pinko you are.
Damn right!
Well, there’s a difference between the traditional type of stats (home runs, runs batted in, stolen bases, batting average et al) and this new fangled next gen obscure-o stats that Billy Beane loves so much that he sticks a feather in his cap and calls it Moneyball. Like OPS.
It still boggles my mind that the team of Rickey Henderson is now pathologically afraid of attempting to steal bases. No wonder they never go anywhere in the postseason.
Look, I LOVE baseball and baseball stat number crunching, but OPS and all this other Moneyball foolishness is too geeky even for me. And I am damn geeky.
OPS is quite simply the overall most efficient, accurate, blunt, measurement of a player’s offensive production. Anything over .750 is pretty decent, and once you reach .850+ you’re really awesome, and over 1.00 you’re an offensive god.
On-base percentage is just how often you reach base, the most important thing a hitter can do. Slugging percentage is a measure of how much power a hitter has, your total bases divided by your at-bats. Adding them together is very simple.
Baseball is one of the most amazing things in the universe to measure statistically, because every event happens in isolation, and there are literally thousands or millions of iterations, screening out the luck factor
If you’re really an A’s fan, then you should be amazed with how much success they’ve had with a fraction of the operating revenue. They’ve averaged 94 wins for seven years with a payroll in the bottom third. Billy Beane didn’t come up with the word “Moneyball,” nor did he write the book, despite what Joe Morgan thinks.
Johnson, you’re on one of my fantasy teams! Don’t get hurt/start sucking again!
Yeah. I would say OPS is a much less worthless stat than some of the simpler stats people usually drool over, like Wins (which are too dependent on the team’s offensive output… oh and I’m talking about the pitching stat Wins… not team victories) and RBIs (which are too dependent on whether your teammates are in scoring position often).
Well, I waffle back and forth between being immensely pleased to the point almost probably of being spoiled by how well the A’s farm system works, because every year there’s new, young, good players who jump into the stream and produce and keep the team competing and winning…
…and being frustrated at watching those guys being too good/expensive for the A’s to keep, watching them go off to other teams, often times Our Common American League Enemy (you know which team I mean :))
Hey, the A’s are loads of fun to watch, don’t get me wrong. But they’d be even funner if they’d steal bases and bunt and hit and run and do all that scrappy small ball stuff that teams that tend to win World Series tend to do. (I am still so jealous of that 02 Angels team. I mean the aggressive base running and spray singles hitting {and they bounced the New York Shinra in four games, too}, not the rally monkey and thunderstick foolishness :D)
Station to station Boo runners in motion Yay, essentially.
argh!!!
listen, bunting and stealing and whatnot DOES NOT make you a world series champion. In a few select late-game situations, yeah it might have some value. Or if you can steal bases over 80% of the time, you should do it. But you shouldn’t run or bunt just for the sake of it, MOST of the time it’s going to limit your offensive ability. The most important number in baseball is “3,” the number of outs you get in an inning. It is of the utmost importance to not give those outs away, scoring runs is hard, you need as many opportunities as possible.
I’ll use two examples to illustrate my point.
that lists the number of Sacrifice Hits each team had last year. I know, it’s crude, but bear with me. If you look over the list, there is NO correlation between getting lots of sacrifice hits, and winning lots of games. The Mets and Cardinals were both in the top 10 for sacrifice hits and made the playoffs, but the Red Sox and Oakland did too, and they’re in the bottom part of the list. It has little correlation.
now here’s something else, from the 2005 season:
http://www.baseballprospectus.com/statistics/expected_runs_matrix2005.premium.php
Those are the expected number of runs you would expect to get in every possible out and baserunner situation in the 2005 season. If you’ll notice, having 0 outs and a runner on first leads to MORE runs than if you have a runner on 2nd and 1 out, which would happen if you bunted him over.
You should also know that once everyone in baseball discovered OBP and started using that when signing players, it priced Oakland out of that market. They’ve since devoted themselves to figuring out ways to better value pitching and defense than other teams currently do, as best as they can.
also, Anaheim’s WS win had a lot more to do with a phenomenal pitching staff, especially the bullpen (and especially K-Rod!), than any sort of bunt or gritty Erstad play.
Oh, gee, thanks for bringing up the '02 WS again, guys. I still have nightmares about that. =(