Sabermetrics 101: What’s Sabermetrics?

Or why baseball stats are awesome

Imagine, you’re home, watching a good old baseball game on TV. A 0.300 hitter comes to the plate. Some fancy video overlay shows that he’s only one for 7 against the pitcher on the mound. The broadcaster casually announces that the guy has been in a kind of slump, with only four hits in his last 15 AB, so don’t expect much.

Except that while you go grab some food during this (apparently) already lost duel, the batter hits a home run. What happened to the slump? And the one for 7 thing? Is baseball absolutely unpredictable? Or was it some kind of clutch effect?

All of these questions are legitimate. And lucky us, very smart people have been studying the national pastime for decades now, trying to determine what is just purely imaginative narrative, and what is actually accurate. These studies generally fall into what we call Sabermetrics.

This term was first coined by Bill James, who is probably the most renowned Sabermetrician of all, even if people before him questioned baseball wisdom. And if you’ve seen the movie Moneyball (or better, read the eponym book), you already know some of the questions sabermetrics enthusiasts are trying to answer.

Sabermetrics is generally about stats. Or rather, it often uses them to debunk common mistakes, do better predictions, or simply compare players. And here are just a few examples:

-Is batting average the ultimate performance criterion for a batter? (Spoiler: not at all)

-Is the skipper of my favourite team right or wrong about his lineup order?

-Is it a good idea to steal second-base when there are two outs?

-Why is my favorite slugger not hitting home runs these past five games?

-What is that OPS nonsense? And what’s that weird xwOBA that pops on my broadcast?

If these questions sound interesting to you, then this series of articles is for you. Note that I’ll try to use as much real-world examples as possible. But I’ll also mention Astonishing Baseball simulation game from time to time, because simulation is very handy to verify theories.

Some amazing links:

Baseball reference: the perfect place to find any stats about any baseball player. Soon your favorite website.

Fangraphs: Because there’s never enough baseball website in your browser history.

Sabr.org: home of most incredible community of baseball enthusiasts.

astonishing-sports.app: the ultimate baseball simulation game on Android