Which Stats Are Overrated and Why

March is fantasy baseball season, and in it, most of our evenings and weekends will be filled with drafts and auctions or prepping for said. If you’re just beginning to incorporate a sabermetric bent to your fantasy preparations (i.e. if you haven’t moved on to Fantasy Fantasy Baseball), sorting through the copious stats that are now widely available can be frustrating. You want to know which stats are most predictive of future performance, and which are red herrings, but you don’t know your wOBAs from your U.N.I.T.Y.s.

Fortunately for the beginners out there, I’m here to give you a cheat sheet on which stats are overrated, and to explain, with great clarity and exactitude (not to be confused with “Natitude“) why they are overrated.

 

Batting Average (AVG)

I’ll just leave this first one to everyone’s sabermatrician, Joe Morgan:

A good hitter makes sure no men are on base when he makes an out — even if that means killing all baserunners before a plate appearance.

 

RBI

RBIs are highly dependent on the context that surrounds a player: you never know what a player is going to have a taste for in any given week or month, let alone across an entire season. One year he might be all about the ribbies, then get pregnant and develop a craving for the chippies and switch to golf. Plus, teams are starting to ban certain distracting foodstuffs nowadays, and you can never tell when ribbies will be the next to go. You can try to account for this by researching player demographics or the latest culinary trends, but that’s a lot of work. I’ll believe in RBIs when I eat one — and I’m a vegetarian.

 

WINS (W)

Here’s another stat that’s just too context dependent. I heard a story once about an official scorer that developed a sudden case of dislexia and wrote an “L” next to Greg Maddux’s name after he threw an 89-pitch, complete game shutout. This sort of thing happens more than you would think, and until we have access to the medical records of all the scorers, we just can’t rely on them. Pitchers themselves can be fickle, too: on any given day a pitcher might be feeling especially generous and decide to transfer his Win to a friend, or he might be preoccupied and forget to pick up his W at the security desk before he leaves the ballpark. In short, I just don’t trust pitchers, I don’t trust their Win-digging friends, and I don’t trust scorers these days. Therefore, I don’t trust Wins as a stat.

 

Earned Run Average (ERA)

A game’s mood can change with a single pitch and different situations call for different approaches. Sometimes, a pitcher pitches to contact, and sometimes he pitches to a homerun; ERA doesn’t account for that at all. You easily can adjust for this inaccuracy, however, by subtracting Intentional Runs (IR) from Earned Runs to create a new stat, Unintentional, Yet Earned, Run Average (UYERA). To calculate Intentional Runs, you simply look at how a pitcher reacts when he gives up a run. If he smiles, nods his approval to the dugout, or seems generally stoic, count it as an IR. This free Automated Face Analysis software from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon and a simple DVR will put you well on your way to more accurate pitcher evaluation. It’s time for a new ERA!

 

Now that you can eliminate — or adjust — the above stats, you’ll be dominating your fantasy leagues and baseball conversations alike with ignorance to spare!

 

Hat tip to my main man Kyle, who linked this classic JoeChat in a recent article.