Sabermetrics
The term is derived from the acronym SABR, which stands for the Society for American Baseball Research. It was coined by Bill James, who was among its first proponents and has long been its most prominent and public advocate.
From David Grabiner's Sabermetric Manifesto:
Bill James defined sabermetrics as "the search for objective knowledge about baseball." Thus, sabermetrics attempts to answer objective questions about baseball, such as "which player on the Red Sox contributed the most to the team's offense?" or "How many home runs will Ken Griffey, Jr.
hit next year?" It cannot deal with the subjective judgments which are also important to the game, such as "Who is your favorite player?"
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It may, however, attempt to settle questions such as "Was Willie Mays faster than Mickey Mantle?" by establishing several possible parameters for examining speed in objective studies (how many triples each man hit, how many bases each man stole, how many times was he caught stealing) and then reaching a tentative conclusion on the basis of these individual studies.
Sabermetricians frequently call into question traditional measures of baseball skill. For instance, batting average is generally considered by them to be a statistic of limited usefulness because it turns out to be a poor predictor of a team's ability to score runs.
A more typical sabermetric reasoning would say that runs win ballgames, and that therefore a good measure of a player's worth is his ability to help his team score more runs than the opposing team. While many areas of study are still in development, it has yielded a number of interesting insights into the game of baseball and in the area of performance measurement.
Some sabermetric measurements have entered mainstream baseball usage, especially OPS (on-base plus slugging) as well as WHIP (walks plus hits per inning pitched).
Examples of sabermetric measurements
Base Runs (BsR)
Draft round values (DRV)
Defense Independent Pitching Statistics (DIPS)
Equivalent average (EQA)
Fantasy Batter Value (FBV)
Late-inning pressure situations (LIPS)
On-base plus slugging (OPS)
PECOTA
Peripheral ERA (PERA)
Pythagorean expectation
Range Factor
Runs created
Secondary average
Similarity score
Speed Score
Super linear weights
Total player rating (aka PW/BFW)
Value over replacement player (VORP)
Win shares
Major proponents of sabermetrics (alphabetically arranged)
Billy Beane has been the general manager of the Oakland Athletics since 1997.
Although not a public proponent of sabermetrics, it has been widely noted that Beane has steered the team during his tenure according to sabermetric principles. Since the Athletics have lower revenues and are considered a small market team, Beane's use of sabermetrics to capitalize on what are perceived to be undervalued talents is sometimes credited with keeping the A's competitive with larger market teams like the Yankees and Red Sox.
Before the Oakland Athletics pioneered sabermetrics in action, rigorous statistical analysis of potential player performance was rare.
In 2003, Michael Lewis published Moneyball about Billy Beane's use of a more quantitative approach. The technique is based on skill measurement, estimates the future value of the skills, and especially on the orchestration of the skills into a successful organization.
By the late 2000s, "Sabermetric" thinking had become pervasive.
In real sports, in fantasy sports, and indeed, in almost every economic activity, Sabermetrics has fostered a huge appetite for better methods. Finding efficient ways of meeting goals, or, "Winning" invigorating interest in applied statistical analysis.
Don Daglow and Eddie Dombrower are baseball simulation game designers whose sabermetrics-based games have introduced "new statistics" to expanded audiences.
It was in this book that sabermetric baseball analysis was thrust into the mainstream. He has hired sabermetricians Bill James and Eric Van to work for the Red Sox.
Earnshaw Cook was an early researcher and proponent of statistical baseball research.
His 1964 book Percentage Baseball was the first book of baseball statistics studies to gain national media attention.
Bill James is widely considered the father of sabermetrics due to his extensive series of books, although a number of less well known SABR researchers in the early 1970s provided a foundation for his work. His two Historical Baseball Abstract editions and Win Shares book have continued to advance the field of sabermetrics, 25 years after he began.
Kellerman is a very vocal proponent of sabermetrics, using concepts from the field quite frequently on the show. He has also hosted many practicing sabermetricians on the show.
Sean Lahman created a database of baseball statistics from existing sources and in the mid-1990s made it available for free download on the Internet.
It recognizes that a pitcher's ratio of strikeouts is much more than a trivial statistic and is the only true way a pitcher can control the play's outcome, independent of his defense (as the name would indicate.)
Rob Neyer is a columnist for ESPN's web site who has espoused sabermetrics since the mid-1980s, when he was an assistant to Bill James. He has authored or co-authored several books about baseball, and his ESPN website page focuses on sabermetric methods for looking at baseball players' and teams' performance.
Ron Shandler, author of Baseball Forecaster, an annual publication focused on applying sabermetrics to fantasy baseball, and founder of Baseball HQ, a website with the same focus.
Nate Silver, managing partner of Baseball Prospectus, inventor of PECOTA.
His claim to fame, however, is as a political analyst and commentator on his own site FiveThirtyEight.com, where he applied sabermetric principles to opinion polls.
David Smith founded Retrosheet in 1989, with the objective of computerizing the box score of every major league baseball game ever played in order to more accurately collect and compare the statistics of the game. In particular, he has worked in the area of defense independent pitching statistics.
Thorn is a noted baseball historian, while Palmer is by profession a statistician, although each has deep knowledge in the specialty of the other. They collaborated on two books that present sabermetric statistics and readable, common-sense explanations for why it's worth thinking about them: The Hidden Game of Baseball and the series of baseball encyclopedias called Total Baseball, with David Pietrusza and the late Michael Gershman.
He was hired in 2007 by the Cleveland Indians as their Manager of Baseball Research & Analytics. Wright, a statistician for the Texas Rangers, was the first front office employee in Major League Baseball to work under the title "Sabermetrician." He went on to a career as a consultant to several major league teams.
That book's later translation into Japanese allowed Wright to add the Hanshin Tigers to his stable of major league clients.
Sabermetric groups
Baseball Prospectus is an annual publication (latest Baseball Prospectus 2008 ISBN 0-452-28903-3) and web site BaseballProspectus.com produced by a group of sabermetricians who originally met over the Internet. The website publishes analytical articles as well as advanced statistics and projections for individuals and teams.
Recently, BP's long-time team member Keith Woolner (known for his development of VORP) was hired as an assistant to the general manager of the Cleveland Indians.
The Hardball Times is a website as well as an annual volume that evaluates the preceding major league season and presents original research articles on various sabermetric topics. It demonstrates and promotes the use of graphs and charts.
SABR is the Society for American Baseball Research, founded in 1971, and the root of the term sabermetrics.
Curve Ball: Baseball, Statistics, and the Role of Chance in the Game.