Sabermetrics is the analysis of
baseball through objective evidence, especially
baseball statistics. The term is
derived from the
acronym SABR, which stands
for the
Society
for American Baseball Research. It was coined by
Bill James, who was among its first proponents
and has long been its most prominent and public advocate.
From David Grabiner's
Sabermetric Manifesto:
It may, however, attempt to settle questions such as "Was
Willie Mays faster than
Mickey Mantle?" by establishing several
possible parameters for examining speed in objective studies (how
many triples each man hit, how many bases each man stole, how many
times was he caught stealing) and then reaching a tentative
conclusion on the basis of these individual studies.
Sabermetricians frequently call into question traditional measures
of baseball skill. For instance,
batting
average is generally considered by them to be a statistic of
limited usefulness because it turns out to be a poor predictor of a
team's ability to score runs. A more typical sabermetric reasoning
would say that runs win ballgames, and that therefore a good
measure of a player's worth is his ability to help his team score
more runs than the opposing team. In particular, they tend to
emphasize
on base
percentage.
Accordingly, sabermetric measures—such as Bill James's
runs created and
win
shares or
Pete Palmer's
total player rating—are usually phrased
in terms of either runs or team wins; a truly outstanding player,
for example, might be described as being worth 54 runs more than an
average player at the same position over the course of a full
season.
Sabermetrics is concerned both with determining the value of a
player in past seasons and with trying to predict the value of a
player in the future. While many areas of study are still in
development, it has yielded a number of interesting insights into
the game of baseball and in the area of performance
measurement.
Some sabermetric measurements have entered mainstream baseball
usage, especially
OPS (on-base
plus slugging) as well as
WHIP (walks plus hits per
inning pitched).
Examples of sabermetric measurements
Major proponents of sabermetrics (alphabetically arranged)
Billy Beane has been the
general manager of the
Oakland Athletics since 1997. Although not
a public proponent of sabermetrics, it has been widely noted that
Beane has steered the team during his tenure according to
sabermetric principles. Since the Athletics have lower revenues and
are considered a small market team, Beane's use of sabermetrics to
capitalize on what are perceived to be undervalued talents is
sometimes credited with keeping the A's competitive with larger
market teams like the
Yankees and
Red Sox.
Before the Oakland Athletics pioneered sabermetrics in action,
rigorous statistical analysis of potential player performance was
rare. In 2003,
Michael Lewis
published
Moneyball
about Billy Beane's use of a more quantitative approach. This
chronicle of Beane's success at Oakland became a classic. The
technique is based on skill measurement, estimates the future value
of the skills, and especially on the orchestration of the skills
into a successful organization.
Don Daglow and
Eddie Dombrower are baseball
simulation game designers whose
sabermetrics-based games have introduced "new statistics" to
expanded audiences. They are best known for
Intellivision World Series
Baseball (1983) and
Earl Weaver Baseball (1987).
Daglow also designed
Baseball (1971),
Tony La Russa Baseball (1991)
and
Old Time Baseball
(1995).
Paul DePodesta was a key figure in
Michael Lewis' book
Moneyball: The Art
of Winning an Unfair Game. It was in this book that sabermetric
baseball analysis was thrust into the mainstream. At the age of 31,
he was named general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers on February
16, 2004 making him the fourth-youngest person to be named general
manager in baseball history. On June 30, 2006, DePodesta was hired
as the special assistant of baseball operations for the
San Diego Padres.
Theo Epstein is
general manager of the
Boston Red Sox. He is the first GM of a large
market team to utilize principles of sabermetrics. He has hired
sabermetricians
Bill James and
Eric Van to work for the Red Sox.
Earnshaw Cook was an early researcher
and proponent of statistical baseball research. His 1964 book
Percentage Baseball was the first book of baseball
statistics studies to gain national media attention.
Bill James is widely considered the
father of sabermetrics due to his extensive series of books,
although a number of less well known SABR researchers in the early
1970s provided a foundation for his work. He began publishing his
Baseball Abstracts in 1977 to study some questions about
baseball he found interesting, and their eclectic mix of essays
based on new kinds of statistics soon became popular with a
generation of thinking baseball fans. He discontinued the Abstracts
after the 1988 edition, but continued to be active in the field.
His two
Historical Baseball
Abstract editions and
Win
Shares book have continued to advance the field of
sabermetrics, 25 years after he began. In 2002 James was hired as a
special advisor to the
Boston Red
Sox.
Max Kellerman co-hosts Kellerman and Kenney on 1050 ESPN Radio
(WEPN
), from New York (also broadcast on XM).
Kellerman is a very vocal proponent of sabermetrics, using concepts
from the field quite frequently on the show. He has also hosted
many practicing sabermetricians on the show.
Sean Lahman created a database of
baseball statistics from existing sources and in the mid-1990s made
it available for free download on the Internet. For the first time,
this gave everyone access to the statistical data in electronic
form, fostering new research and leading to innovation like Sean
Forman's
Baseball-Reference
[4911]
website. Lahman was also contributing editor for three editions of
Total Baseball and five editions of the
ESPN Baseball
Encyclopedia.
Voros McCracken developed a system
called
Defense
Independent Pitching Statistics (DIPS) to evaluate a pitcher
based purely on his ability. It recognizes that a pitcher's ratio
of strikeouts is much more than a trivial statistic and is the only
true way a pitcher can control the play's outcome, independent of
his defense (as the name would indicate.)
Rob Neyer is a columnist for
ESPN's web site who has espoused sabermetrics since the
mid-1980s, when he was an assistant to
Bill
James. He has authored or co-authored several books about
baseball, and his ESPN website page focuses on sabermetric methods
for looking at baseball players' and teams' performance.
Ron Shandler, author of
Baseball
Forecaster, an annual publication focused on applying
sabermetrics to fantasy baseball, and founder of
Baseball HQ, a website
with the same focus.
Nate Silver, writer and former managing
partner of
Baseball Prospectus, inventor of
PECOTA. Perhaps a greater claim to fame, however, is
his subsequent work as a political analyst and commentator on his
own site
FiveThirtyEight.com,
where he applies sabermetric principles to the analysis of
opinion polls. In 2009, he also developed a
rating system for national teams in the FIFA 2010 World Cup Soccer
tournament:
ESPN's "Soccer Power Index"
(SPI).
David Smith founded
Retrosheet [4912] in 1989,
with the objective of computerizing the
box
score of every major league baseball game ever played in order
to more accurately collect and compare the statistics of the game.
Although Smith is most of all a historian, the opportunity to apply
sabermetric analysis to the data in order to better understand
baseball's history, players and records is the driving motivation
behind the all-volunteer project.
Tom Tango, who has as an online presence
as TangoTiger, runs the
Tango on Baseball sabermetrics
website. In particular, he has worked in the area of
defense independent
pitching statistics. He is co-author (with Mitchel Lichtman and
Andrew Dolphin) of
The Book: Playing the Percentages in
Baseball (Potomac Books, 2006) (ISBN 1597971294).
John Thorn and
Pete Palmer are the authors most often mentioned
along with Bill James as having popularized sabermetrics. Thorn is
a noted baseball historian, while Palmer is by profession a
statistician, although each has deep knowledge in the specialty of
the other. They collaborated on two books that present sabermetric
statistics and readable, common-sense explanations for why it's
worth thinking about them:
The Hidden Game of Baseball
and the series of baseball encyclopedias called
Total Baseball, with
David Pietrusza and the late Michael
Gershman. They also include the mathematical formulae for the
statisticians, but the strength of their books is the accessibility
of the statistics for everyday baseball fans.
Thorn is a frequent
commentator for ESPN, was advisor to the
Ken Burns documentary series "Baseball"
(1994), and is an advisor to the Baseball Hall of Fame
in Cooperstown, New York
. Thorn, Palmer and Gershman provided the
statistics and analysis for the
Tony La Russa Baseball series of
computer games.
Keith Woolner, creator of VORP, or
Value over Replacement Player, is a former writer for sabermetric
group/website
Baseball
Prospectus. He was hired in 2007 by the
Cleveland Indians as their Manager of
Baseball Research & Analytics.
He has two bachelor's degrees from
Massachusetts Institute of
Technology
and a master's degree from Stanford
University
.
Craig R. Wright, a statistician for the
Texas Rangers, was the first front
office employee in Major League Baseball to work under the title
"Sabermetrician." He went on to a career as a consultant to several
major league teams. He is the primary author (with
Tom House) of
The Diamond Appraised (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1989) (ISBN 0-671-67769-1). That book's
later translation into
Japanese
allowed Wright to add the Hanshin Tigers to his stable of major
league clients.
Sabermetric groups
Baseball Prospectus is an annual
publication (latest
Baseball Prospectus 2008 ISBN
0-452-28903-3) and web site
BaseballProspectus.com produced by a group of
sabermetricians who originally met over the
Internet. Several Baseball Prospectus authors have
invented or improved upon widely relied upon sabermetric measures
and techniques. The website publishes analytical articles as well
as advanced statistics and projections for individuals and teams.
This group also publishes other books that use and seek to
popularize sabermetric techniques, including
Baseball Between
the Numbers (2006) (ISBN 0-465-00596-9) and
It Ain't Over
'til It's Over (2007) (ISBN 0-465-00285-4). Recently, BP's
long-time team member
Keith Woolner
(known for his development of
VORP) was hired
as an assistant to the general manager of the
Cleveland Indians.
The Hardball Times is a website
[4913]
as well as an annual volume that evaluates the preceding major
league season and presents original research articles on various
sabermetric topics. The website also publishes original research on
baseball. It demonstrates and promotes the use of graphs and
charts.
Fangraphs is a website that publishes
advanced baseball statistics as well as graphics that evaluate and
track the performance of players and teams. The site also favors
the analysis of play-by-play data and
Pitch
f/x. It draws on some of the advanced baseball metrics
developed by well-known sabetmetricians such as
Tom Tango and Mitchel Lichtman.
SABR is the
Society for American Baseball Research, founded in 1971, and the
root of the term sabermetrics. Statistical study, however, is only
a small component of SABR members' research, which also focuses on
diverse issues including ballparks, the Negro Leagues, rules
changes, and the desegregation of baseball as a mirror of American
culture.
See also
Footnotes
- Kipen, D. (June 1, 2003). Retrieved November 2, 2007 "Billy Beane's brand-new ballgame"
San Francisco Chronicle
- Neyer, R. (November 5, 2002). Retrieved March 7, 2009 "Red Sox hire James in advisory capacity"
ESPN.com
- Shanahan, M. (May 23, 2005). Retrieved November 2, 2007
His numbers are in the ballpark
The
Boston Globe
- (June 28, 2005). Retrieved November 2, 2007 "Bill James, Beyond Baseball" PBS Think Tank with Ben
Wattenberg
- Ackman, D. (May 20, 2007). Retrieved November 2, 2007 "Sultan of Stats" The Wall
Street Journal
- (2006). Retrieved November 2, 2007 "about sean
lahman"
- Jaffe, C. (October 22, 2007). Retrieved November 2, 2007
"Rob Neyer Interview" The Hardball
Times
- Nate Silver, "A Guide to ESPN's SPI Rating," November 11, 2009.
- IMDb. (n.d.). Retrieved
November 2, 2007 " 'Baseball' (1994)"
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