I was playing on Fangraphs yesterday and came across some really fun statistics and some things that I was amazed they kept track of. It also came to my attention that I needed a better education on some of these advanced sabermetrics if I’m going to keep the baseball blog up and running. Figure it’ll be interesting and enlightening.
ISO: Isolated Power is calculated as (total bases-hits)/(At bats). Basically this stat measures someone’s pension for hitting extra base hits. The worst ISO in the league right now (.028) is Juan Pierre who has 36 hits with 33 of those singles. While Jose Bautista sports a .410 ISO as he has 35 hits with only 17 singles.
Pythagorean Record: Fun stat to help see how lucky or unlucky a team got over the course of a season based on runs allowed and runs scored. To Calculate: (runs scored)^2/(runs scored^2+runs allowed^2) and that gives you the team’s win percentage. You then multiply by 162 to get the number of wins. The 2001 Mariners finished 116-46. Some luck had to be involved in winning 116 games but the Pythagorean Record suggests they were still extremely talented as it sits at 109-53. Our Vassar College baseball team was 7-14 in conference this year but, the Pythagorean Record was 11-10 suggesting we got some bad luck.
FIP: Fielding Independent Pitching is a measure of all those things for which a pitcher is specifically responsible. The formula is (HR*13+(BB+HBP-IBB)*3-K*2)/IP, plus a league-specific factor (usually around 3.2) to round out the number to an equivalent ERA number. FIP helps you understand how well a pitcher pitched, regardless of how well his fielders fielded. Matt Garza has had some awful luck this year and hit 1.50 FIP (second in the league) backs his case up. The Top 10 leaders in FIP seems like a who’s who this year in pitching. Halladay, Lincecum, Haren, Weaver, Lee, and Josh Johnson are all up there.
wOBA: Weighted On Base Average is similar to on base percentage (OBP) but assigns a value to each way a player could get on base. If you walk, instead of a point, you get .95. Homerun-1.95. This way a walk and homerun are not rewarded in the same way. Also, at the end the math guys multiply by a number to make it comparable to standard OBP where .400 is considered good. League Leader in wOBA? Jose Bautista with .541. League worst is Ronny Cedeno at .215. Also, we all know that Carl Crawford has not been good but he currently sports the 10th worst wOBA in the Majors.
WPA: Win Probability Added. An interesting new trend throughout sporting events are 
these win probability graphs. It’s complicated mathematics that basically determines each event within a game’s impact on the final outcome. The WPA of a player is their total WPA of all the games they’ve played. Keep in mind 1.00 means that that player won the game by themselves (Like in basketball if LeBron outscored the Celtics, he would have a WPA close to 1.00). Current leaders? James Shields for the pitchers at 2.09 and Jose Bautista for the hitters with 2.42.
This was not intended to be a comprehensive listing of the complicated sabermetrics out there but, you’ve probably seen these numbers out there and this post should serve as a way to understand the numbers when you see them.
Stat of the Day: 1.5% is the projected growth in global oil demand this year. We continue to demand more oil but there’s no “oil heaven” of endless fields of oil. WHY IS IT THAT NOBODY CARES? The good news? Oil demand grew by 3.1% last year so we’re slowing our growth of demand. 🙂
-Sean Morash
