skyking162

I caught a bit of the Angels-Rangers game on ESPN last night and witnessed Joe Morgan discussing two statistics with clarity and (relative) intelligence. After an on-screen graphic showed Orlando Cabrera’s excellent fielding percentage, the dialog went something like this:

Joe: Fielding percentage is a good stat for telling you how often a fielder makes the play when he gets to the ball. It doesn’t tell you if Cabrera has a good arm or a lot of range.
John: But he does. He’s excellent at all aspects of fielding.
Joe: Oh I agree. But fielding percentage doesn’t tell you about those other things. It’s like OPS.
John: OPS — the stat that’s become so popular these days.
Joe: Yes. OPS tells you how good a player is, but it doesn’t tell you how someone plays the game. It doesn’t tell you their strengths and weaknesses.
John: (Thinks to himself Way to go, Joe — only took you thirty years to figure that one out.)

If you’ll allow me a little leeway in interpreting Joe’s points (such as the fact that OPS is pretty much the opposite of fielding percentage, he made three excellent ones:
- Errors and fielding percentage are just one piece of fielding.
- OPS is good at telling you how good a player is.
- OPS isn’t useful for telling you about individual parts of the game.

Ok, so point number two isn’t all that cutting edge, but at least Joe knows what OPS is and knows that it’s useful. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go put a bunch of money down on the Bills to win the Super Bowl this year.

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 3rd, 2007 at 10:09 am and is filed under Baseball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.