Should in-depth statistics play a prominent role in analyzing Major League Baseball?

Enough with the numbers — baseball is baseball

Christian Caple

If we’re relying on VORP, Pythagorean projections and other ratios only explainable by MIT computer science graduate students to tell us who is going to win and how often, is it really even about baseball anymore?

There simply isn’t any value to a statistic or a projection that tells us what should happen on the field, because baseball is played by living people capable of unforeseen greatness and unfathomable error.

In a perfect world, yes, the Mariners would be pitching a little better right now and probably would still have some glimmer of hope for the postseason.

But we don’t live in a perfect world. We live in the real world, where things like injuries, slumps, down-years, mental issues and Jose Canseco can happen.

That’s why these in-depth stats are so worthless. Give me a guy’s batting average, his RBI, runs scored, home run and extra base hit totals, his on-base percentage and his on-base plus slugging (OPS). We can agree that based off those numbers alone, most could tell you whether a guy is producing or not.

Let’s get back to VORP — or “value over replacement player,” a stat that determines how valuable a player is when compared to what a replacement-level player could do in the same number of at-bats.

My question: Who cares? Alex Rodriguez is arguably the best player in the game. If he got traded, the Yankees would experience a considerable drop-off at third base. That’s common sense. We don’t need a statistic to tell us that A-Rod’s replacement probably isn’t going to be as good as he is.

Sure, nobody who just glances at a box score will know that a guy who goes 0-for-4 with three lineouts actually hit the ball well that day. But it’s a 162-game season, and these kinds of things average out over that long of a schedule.

I saw a stat recently on a baseball blog about how some guy has actually put in the time and research to come up with a “preliminary aging curve for fastball speed.”

In English: pitchers lose velocity on their fastball when they get older, most of them around the age of 29.

That’s mind-blowing stuff. Who knew that pitchers don’t throw as hard when they get older? Thank God we have people like Josh Kalk to figure this kind of thing out for us, or else I would have been under the impression that 44-year-old Randy Johnson still regularly cracks triple digits on the radar gun.

This just in: catchers are slow, pitchers can’t hit and Barry Bonds has a huge head. Stop the presses.

This is the kind of thing that is turning baseball into the nerdiest sport on the planet, and it needs to stop. Numbers and projections that dictate the likeliest outcomes are about as reliable as Florida state’s presidential exit polls.

Numbers will never put on a glove, swing a bat in the on-deck circle or tear an ACL sliding into second base.

Because sometimes, a mediocre player like Bret Boone drives in more than 100 runs and finishes second in the MVP voting.

Because sometimes, a small hot-streak and a lot of luck can turn into a World Series appearance for a team that was supposed to finish in last place.

And because sometimes, that stud you signed in the off-season just has a crappy year.

Human beings play these games. Computers will never tell the whole story.

In-depth stats help determine real talent

Allen Wagner

Anybody can look at Adrian Beltre’s sub-.250 batting average in the newspaper or online and automatically assume he’s not very good, and possibly not worth the money the Mariners pay him.

But Beltre is good, and he’s definitely worth his contract. Understanding in-depth statistics gives good insight into not only why Beltre is awesome and not terrible, but they also tell us the value and real talent of other players and even whole teams.

Using Beltre as an example of how helpful these statistics can be, we see that despite having a sub-.250 BA, through last week’s series against Boston, just over 20 percent of balls he’s put in play have been line drives, while 40 percent have been flies. With a batting average on balls in play (BABIP) of only .247, it all means he’s just flat out unlucky.

Beltre has been smacking the ball all over the place, hitting like he’s worth his salary, but lots of his hard-hit balls are ending up in the gloves of opposing fielders.

Without knowing this kind of information, many fans, casual observers and even people within baseball would assume Beltre isn’t hitting at the level he’s being paid. That would be a supremely unfair assessment considering some of the real underachievers on the Mariners.

An example of one such player is Carlos Silva. It’s common knowledge at this point that his three-year, $48 million deal is a glorious waste of money, but the M’s didn’t have to make the deal in the first place if they knew what they were getting into.

Seattle’s front office signed Silva because they believed him to be an ultra ground ball pitcher who rarely gives up fly balls. His earned run average in the past few years seemed to show that, yes, he was a slightly above average pitcher with the skills already mentioned. But once again, looking at certain ratios, you begin to see that he’s been in a serious decline in the last few years.

His ground ball ratio has steadily gone down since his debut in 2002 and his fly ball ratio has steadily gone up over that time. This year, 40 percent of balls in play off Silva have been fly balls. Fly balls lead to deep doubles and home runs, especially with Raul Ibanez in left field, and those usually lead to bad “commoner” stats like ERA.

So I think it’s pretty clear that these days, common stats just don’t cut it anymore, especially when your favorite organization has to compete against general managers who value the more in-depth variety, like Oakland’s Billy Beane and Boston’s Theo Epstein.

These stats can help paint a clear picture of the value and talent of a player or team and definitely have a place in baseball, whether at the management level, player level or fan level.