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Baseball statistics play an important role in evaluating the progress of a player or team.
Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each, taking turns batting and fielding. The game occurs over the course of several plays, with each play generally beginning when a player on the fielding team, called the pitcher, throws a ball that a player on the batting team, called the batter, tries to hit with a bat. The objective of the offensive team is to hit the ball into the field of play, away from the other team's players, allowing its players to run the bases, having them advance counter-clockwise around four bases to score what are called "runs". The objective of the defensive team is to prevent batters from becoming runners, and to prevent runners' advance around the bases. A run is scored when a runner legally advances around the bases in order and touches home plate.
In sports analytics, sabermetrics is the empirical analysis of baseball, especially baseball statistics that measure in-game activity. Sabermetricians collect and summarize the relevant data from this in-game activity to answer specific questions. The term is derived from the acronym SABR, which stands for the Society for American Baseball Research, founded in 1971. The term "sabermetrics" was coined by Bill James, who is one of its pioneers and is often considered its most prominent advocate and public face.
George William James is an American baseball writer, historian, and statistician whose work has been widely influential. Since 1977, James has written more than two dozen books about baseball history and statistics. His approach, which he named sabermetrics after the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), scientifically analyzes and studies baseball, often through the use of statistical data, in an attempt to determine why teams win and lose.
A run batted in or runs batted in (RBI) is a statistic in baseball and softball that credits a batter for making a play that allows a run to be scored. For example, if the batter bats a base hit which allows a teammate on a higher base to reach home and so score a run, then the batter gets credited with an RBI.
The Rawlings Gold Glove Award, usually referred to as simply the Gold Glove, is the award given annually to the Major League Baseball (MLB) players judged to have exhibited superior individual fielding performances at each fielding position in both the National League (NL) and the American League (AL). Winners are determined from voting by the managers and coaches in each league, who are not permitted to vote for their own players. Additionally, a sabermetric component provided by the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) accounts for about 25 percent of the vote.
Michael Terrance Cameron is an American former professional Major League Baseball outfielder. He played for the Chicago White Sox, Cincinnati Reds, Seattle Mariners, New York Mets, San Diego Padres, Milwaukee Brewers, Boston Red Sox, and Florida Marlins over a 16 year career and is currently the Special Assignment Coach for the Seattle Mariners.
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game is a book by Michael Lewis, published in 2003, about the Oakland Athletics baseball team and its general manager Billy Beane. Its focus is the team's analytical, evidence-based, sabermetric approach to assembling a competitive baseball team despite Oakland's small budget. A film based on Lewis' book, starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, was released in 2011.
In baseball, defense-independent pitching statistics (DIPS) is intended to measure a pitcher's effectiveness based only on statistics that do not involve fielders. These include home runs allowed, strikeouts, hit batters, walks, and, more recently, fly ball percentage, ground ball percentage, and line drive percentage. By focusing on these statistics and ignoring what happens once a ball is put in play, which – on most plays – the pitcher has little control over, DIPS claims to offer a clearer picture of the pitcher's true ability.
Baseball Prospectus (BP) is an organization that publishes a website, BaseballProspectus.com, devoted to the sabermetric analysis of baseball. BP has a staff of regular columnists and provides advanced statistics as well as player and team performance projections on the site. Since 1996 the BP staff has also published a Baseball Prospectus annual as well as several other books devoted to baseball analysis and history.
Batting average is a statistic in cricket, baseball, and softball that measures the performance of batters. The development of the baseball statistic was influenced by the cricket statistic.
Baseball Think Factory, abbreviated as BTF or BBTF, is a sabermetrically-oriented baseball web site that features daily news stories in baseball, with original content contributed by SABR members such as Dan Szymborski. The site was previously branded as Baseball Primer, and was created in 2001 by the founders of Baseball-Reference. Contributors who have gone on to work for Major League Baseball front offices include Voros McCracken, Carlos Gomez, and Tom Tango. Bill James' Baseball Abstract books published in the 1980s are widely considered to be the modern predecessor to websites using sabermetrics such as baseballthinkfactory and baseballprospectus.
In baseball, wOBA is a statistic, based on linear weights, designed to measure a player's overall offensive contributions per plate appearance. It is formed from taking the observed run values of various offensive events, dividing by a player's plate appearances, and scaling the result to be on the same scale as on-base percentage. Unlike statistics like OPS, wOBA attempts to assign the proper value for each type of hitting event. It was created by Tom Tango and his coauthors for The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball.
Win Shares is a book about baseball written by Bill James and Jim Henzler. The book explains how to apply the concept of sabermetrics to assess the impact of player performance in a combination of several areas including offensive, defensive and pitching to the overall performance of their team. The resulting "Win Share" also takes into account factors such as the era in which the player was active to allow easy comparisons between players from different eras. The book focuses primarily on the many formula involved in computing the final number of win shares accumulated.
Wins Above Replacement or Wins Above Replacement Player, commonly abbreviated to WAR or WARP, is a non-standardized sabermetric baseball statistic developed to sum up "a player's total contributions to his team". A player's WAR value is claimed to be the number of additional wins his team has achieved above the number of expected team wins if that player were substituted with a replacement-level player: a player who may be added to the team for minimal cost and effort.
Ultimate zone rating (UZR) is a sabermetric statistic used to measure fielding. It compares the event that actually happened (hit/out/error) to data on similarly hit balls in the past to determine how much better or worse the fielder did than the "average" player. UZR divides a baseball field into multiple zones and assigns individual fielders responsibility for those zones.
A Fielding Bible Award recognizes the best defensive player for each fielding position in Major League Baseball (MLB) based on statistical analysis. John Dewan and Baseball Info Solutions conduct the annual selection process, which commenced in 2006. The awards are voted on by 10 sabermetrically inclined journalists and bloggers including Dewan, sabermetric pioneer Bill James, and writers such as Peter Gammons, NBC Sports' Joe Posnanski, SB Nation editor Rob Neyer, and ESPN analyst Doug Glanville. The awards have historically been announced before the Gold Glove Awards, the traditional measurement of fielding excellence. Dewan wrote that this award cannot equal the prestige of the Gold Glove, which started 50 years earlier, but it provides an alternative.
In baseball statistics, NERD is a quantitative measure of expected aesthetic value. NERD was originally created by Carson Cistulli and is part of his project of exploring the "art" of sabermetric research. The original NERD formula only took into account the pitcher's expected performance while a later model factors in the entire team's performance.
Andrew Lee Dirks is an American former professional baseball outfielder. He attended Haven High School in Haven, Kansas, and was drafted by the Detroit Tigers in 2008. Dirks made his Major League Baseball (MLB) debut with the Tigers in 2011. He played all three outfield positions in his three seasons in the major leagues.
Sherri Nichols is an American software engineer, data scientist, and baseball statistician most known for her contribution to baseball's Sabermetrics movement. Growing up loving baseball and math, Nichols fused the two passions together to start analyzing baseball in a stats-driven manner. Her influence on the infant stages of the Sabermetrics movement in the 1980s-1990s can be depicted from various works such as Nichols' Law of Catcher Defense, her work collecting play-by-play data, and most notably her cocreation of Defensive Average. Nichols' assertiveness and knowledge has greatly influenced other notable baseball statisticians and paved the way for other women to enter the male dominated industry.
References
- ↑ Matthew Leach (August 21, 2008). "Glaus has stats to be Gold Glover in '08". mlb.com. Retrieved April 16, 2011.
- 1 2 "RZR | FanGraphs Sabermetrics Library". Fangraphs. January 25, 2011. Retrieved April 16, 2011.
- ↑ Mike DiGiovanna (February 24, 2011). "Angels hope playing the numbers game adds up to something special". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved April 16, 2011.
- ↑ "Don't be so fast to yank Burrell". Courier Post. April 7, 2008. Retrieved April 16, 2011.
- ↑ Brandon Heikoop (November 6, 2008). "2008 American League "Shoulda" Gold Gloves". Bleacher Report. Retrieved April 16, 2011.
- 1 2 Sean Smith (April 2, 2007). "What is Zone Rating?". Hardball Times. Retrieved April 16, 2011.
- 1 2 Bryan Tsao; Carolina Bolado; Joe Distelheim (2007). The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2008. ACTA Publications. ISBN 978-0-87946-341-0 . Retrieved April 16, 2011.