Fun with statistics

Please respond to this essay below!

Statistical Analysis in Baseball

When professional baseball scouts eliminate prospects from their lists of players, they use different strategies. The goal of a professional baseball scout is to find the players that will be the most productive to his respective team. If you ask different scouts on what they value the most in players, you will get different responses. Of course it depends on if the team is in need of a big time pitcher, hitter, or fielder. Billy Beane, the General Manager of the Oakland Athletics, made his way up through the front office by starting in 1990 as the team’s major league advance scout. Some scouts really look at things like how many home runs a player hits or how many bases a player is capable of stealing. In the world of scouting, Billy Beane was a little different.

He valued a player’s ability to get on base. He thought that making it to first base was the most important thing. Of course he would still look for the other skills in players to fit what the team needed at the time. In the book Moneyball, Billy Beane is the focus. In one part, the book tells of some scouting meetings with his partners in the organization. In referring to a whiteboard compiled of a list of not so well known players, Billy is quoted as saying, “There’s some serious on-base percentage up there." His work partner and friend named Bogie ads, “There isn’t a board in the game that looks like this one.” So what is the best way to go about scouting and finding the best players? Some would say going by a player’s statistics is the best way. This is important because scouts obviously want to get a hold of the best players possible, and also, players need to do know what Major League scouts really value in a player. My intent in this paper is to figure out how statistical analysis in baseball works and how it is useful.

Sabermetrics is the mathematical and statistical analysis of baseball records. Scouts and team executives use statistics a lot to figure out the quality of a player. Some of the major and most common statistics include a player’s batting average, a player’s slugging percentage, and for pitchers, the earned run average. The batting average is computed by dividing the number of hits a player has achieved by the number of at–bats for that player. An at–bat is anytime a player goes to the plate and does not walk. A walk is a base-on-balls and does not count as an official at-bat. The batting average is a very good indicator of what kind of hitter a player is. Obviously, the higher the batting average, the better the hitter.

The slugging percentage is used to determine how well a certain player is at hitting for distance. The slugging percentage is computed by dividing the total number of bases reached by the number of opportunities. The earned run average for pitchers is based on the average number of “earned” runs a pitcher allows for every nine innings pitched.

These basic statistics, along with others, are used in evaluating players and their ability to perform at a high level. For a player coming out of college or high school trying to get drafted by a Major League baseball team, having good statistics is obviously an important thing.

So what is the best way to go about drafting a player coming out of college or out of high school? Is it more effective to look at the statistics the player comes with, or is it better to look and try to figure out what kind of player he can develop into based on certain skills that can be built upon? As I mentioned earlier in the paper, Billy Beane, the General Manager of the Oakland A’s, really values a player’s ability to reach base. To him, it all starts with being able to get on base. Something interesting about previously mentioned Sabermetrics, is that it is also a tool used to predict how a certain player will perform in the near future, based on what he did in the past. Sabermetrics attempts to answer objective questions about baseball. This study of statistics is able to help scouts determine if certain players are better than others at stealing bases, catching the ball in the outfield, or not letting the ball get out of the infield.

Another thing one should look at when analyzing baseball statistics, is that some statistics are only useful to a certain extent. For example, a batting average may turn out to be an ineffective way of predicting a team’s ability to score runs. With Sabermetrics, a more proper reasoning would say that the ability to score runs wins games, therefore, a good player would be valuable to a team by his ability to reach base and to help his team score runs. That is why Billy Beane of the Oakland A’s sticks to that philosophy. To him, the ability to be a patient hitter and take four inaccurate pitches is almost equally important as the ability to hit for power.

In Michael Lewis’s book, Moneyball, it documents the fact that Billy Beane uses Sabermetrics in going after “hidden talent.” This means that he very often goes after players who are not as well known in the baseball world of scouting. He tries to find players that he thinks can be developed into something great and who are not at the time being fought for by high-market teams like the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees. By doing this, he has received a lot of the credit for being able to keep the Oakland A’s competitive and usually a very successful baseball team.

When it comes down to it, scouts will go after the kinds of players that they like and that the team is currently in need of. It is hard to determine which is the best way to go about finding talent that will be successful in the major leagues. It can be argued in different ways. Some players can be really good in high school and college and be highly touted by scouts, and end up never panning out in the majors. Such was the case for Billy Beane. He was one of the most sought after players coming into the league when he was drafted right behind Darryl Strawberry. Moneyball talks about how he had all the great skills and physical skills needed to succeed in the major leagues. He never ended up being the player he could have been because he didn’t have the right mindset. You just never know how a player will turn out once they get to the big leagues.

Sabermetrics though is one effective way of determining the skills a player has and how effective he will be in the next level. Statistics play such a big role in the game of baseball and they always will.

http://oakland.athletics.mlb.com/oak/team/exec_bios/beane_billy.jsp

http://www-math.bgsu.edu/~albert/papers/saber.html

http://dlserver.samford.edu/essm/studentresearch/ehren_wassermann_fall2003_files/frame.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabermetrics