| Re: Thanks Tom
well, there are some people who think you can learn everything about a player from JUST the numbers, or at least enough to make any sort of baseball/managerial decisions you want to make. However, I am not one of those people
I think you have to use all available information. Part of that is stats. Part of that is traditional scouting. Part of that is character evaluation.
That being said, I think there are two major impacts of sabermetrics. First off, it's allowing people to understand that some of the traditional stats we use arent good ways to evaluate if a guy is good or not. For pitchers, wins and losses are highly dependent on run support and bullpen performance. And saves are just an absolute mess. For hitters, runs and RBIs depend on the team around you. If you dont have a lot of hitters on base, you cant drive in runs. And if the guys behind you suck, you're not gonna score a lot of runs
Secondly, it's made a positive impact in certain uses of in-game strategy. For instance, bunting early in the game. Sacrificing a runner over to 2nd increases your chance of scoring at least one run, but it limits the number of big innings you have. Put another way, imagine you have 10 situations of no outs runner on 1st. And you sacrifice all 10 times. The number of runs you score in those 10 innings might end up looking something like this:
1 0 1 0 2 1 0 1 3 0
You scored at least 1 run in 7 of the 10 innings, but you only scored more than 1 twice.
Now let's say you let the #2 hitter swing away. You might up like this:
2 0 0 1 0 4 0 3 0 2
Now, you were held scoreless in 5 of the 10 innings, but you had 4 multi-run innings. And, you scored 12 runs in this situation, instead of 9, as in the previous example
Not only that, but sabermetric analysis actually kinda foresaw Drew's struggles this year. Baseball Prospectus's PECOTA system projected Drew to struggle this year. Their projection for Drew's VORP (BP's primary offensive stat) this year was 18.8. In the last three years, his VORP was 34.9 (2006), 26.9, and 69.5 (2004). So, they expected a big drop. He was a little bit worse than they thought (15.5), but still...they were able to see that Drew would be much worse this year than he was last year
They projected 14 HRs and 59 RBIs. He was at 11 and 64 this year. They projected BA/OBP/SLG of 270/382/463. His actual numbers: 270/373/423. Close enough. |