Statistics In Baseball

It can be argued that player statistics are more important to baseball and baseball fans than any other sport. With the amount of downtime in the game, broadcasters and play-by-play announcers have needed something to fill the time with, and what better than to tell how many home runs the boy at the plate has hit this year versus last year. The thing is, statistics weren’t always the super sophisticated and overarching sheet of numbers we usually see about players today. Back in the day, statistics were minimal and done by hand. Let’s dive into the basics of baseball statistics.

In 1858, Henry Chadwick developed the first baseball statistic: the box score. Box score is, in its simplest form, a record of the game. This was the predecessor to the most basic of current baseball statistics such as batting average and earned runs scored. The biggest development was the statistics of batters versus pitchers. Each of these roles have an entirely different set of statistics based on the important information.

Batters statistics:

The first statistic for batters is the most common today. How many runs a player scores is imperative to his time in upper level baseball, and even amateur baseball. Hits, when a player reaches a base, and Strike Outs are two other important factors. The one thing all of these statistics have in common is the ability to do them by viewing. It is easy to tally how many times a runner crosses home or stikes out in a game. The math comes in when we start to look at statistics like On Base Percentage (OBP) and Batting Average (BA). These statistics show the likelihood of a player reaching base, or how far they’ll go when they do. 

Pitcher Statistics:

Pitchers face a task that decides the outcome of games. They are the first people to act in a baseball game and good players are highly sought after. One of the best, and most obvious, ways to judge a pitcher is through strikeouts. Unlike batters, pitchers want their strikeout stats to be high. Wins, when a team wins the game and the starter was in the game when his team took the lead, are another good statistic for how well a pitcher is performing. Again, all of these statistics are available by watching the game. More statistics, such as Left On Base Percentage (LOB) and Quality of Pitch (QOP) are found with math after the fact, and show how many people were on base at the time of the last out and the evaluation of a pitch in cumulative, respectively. 

Post-Game Statistics:

One of my favorite statistics is the Winners Win Probability Added (wWPA). After the game is over, statistics are used to calculate how much the probability of the win was affected by one singular play, for the entire game. This can show how certain plays do or do not affect final outcomes despite what it may seem like in the time.

In summary, statistics help show how the game is progressing over time, as well as who is considered the best. While one player may have hit five homeruns in a week, it has to be compared with the fact that the other 17 times he was up to bat, he struck out. There’s a balance that people in baseball must know in order to fully understand the game, beyond the final numbers broadcast on television.