Category Archives: Statistics

Sabermetrics For Beginners Part III: The Plus Sign

95, 129, and 136, baby.

For our newest installment of SFB, I’d like to introduce you to two of the most deceptively simple and useful statistics, Adjusted On-Base Plus Slugging (OPS+) and Adjusted Earned Run Average (ERA+).

These two stats are used to show a player’s performance, either in hitting or pitching, as compared to the league average in each stat and compensating for that player’s ballpark.

Continue reading

Sabermetrics for Beginners Part II: The Violent Stats

For those of you who have already listened to Episode 6 of the podcast, yes, I know that konnichiwa means “good afternoon,” and not “thank you for listening to our podcast.” Language has never been Thomas’ strong suit, so please forgive him. We felt a shout out to our Japanese listeners was in order after seeing this, a Japanese language podcast directory listing our podcast, and about 88.8% of our podcast’s total downloads have come from Japan, so I guess there’s nothing I can say except for “ポッドキャストを聞いてくれてありがとう”, and I mean that from the bottom of my heart.

Continue reading

Sabermetrics For Beginners Part 1: The “Slash” Line

When Thomas and I first started dreaming podcast-related thoughts, we hoped to have listeners who were fans of the San Francisco Giants Baseball Club, not necessarily fans who had advanced mathematical and statistical training. That said, on the podcast we’ve been throwing out stats left and right, and some of them bear explaining.

First of all, you’re going to hear the term “Sabermetrics” a lot, which is the general term that has come to describe baseball statistics. It has nothing to do with sabers, or swords in any way. Rather, it comes from the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), which was one of the first organizations to do complicated quantification of baseball.

JT over at Triples Alley does a great job of explaining the complicated stats in his glossary, but I’m going to do my best to explain what I can here on this blog too. So here goes:

AVG/OBP/SLG – aka The “Slash” Line:

Continue reading