Bob Ryan: I don't think the "average" fan cares about advanced metrics in MLB

But I think the concept is much more sound than the pot luck stew that is WAR.

Bascially, wOBA measures what different results are actually worth, rather than just assigning a double twice as much value as a single, as SLG does, or assigning a single and a double the same value, as BA does.

 

What's the difference between wOBA and OPS in terms of understanding how a player is doing? Is it a little bit more accurate or is it tremendously more accurate? Right now if a second baseman has a .350 OBP and .825 OPS, I'm fairly certain what that means -- he's pretty good. Is wOBA going to tell me significantly more than that?

 

Probably going to sway you to vote for Trout over Miggy the 88-homer, 276-RBI, .339-average guy the last 2 years.

 

One more "average" fan checking in ...

If writers can show how advanced metrics are being used by GMs and managers to evaluate and/or obtain players, the average fan WOULD care.

We just had the NFL draft, and ESPN exspurts spent countless hours blabbing about every minute stat, measurement and possible position of each potential draft pick.

Judging by the ratings, the average NFL fan cared.

 

Who decides what those different results are actually worth?

 

Nobody "decides" it. It is based upon the accumulation of massive sets of data that analyzes how many runs a double (or triple or home run) led to in a given situation as compared to a single (or double, etc., etc.) in the same situation.

 

And next year it will be a different formula.

 

Somebody decides which data is chosen for inclusion and how it is interpreted.

LTL also raises valid questions. How long has this formula been used? Has it been stable, or are the sabermetricians still tinkering with it?

 

Right.

Because they examine the data set for each season to determine the value of each event.

But it's remarkably close year after year. There's a chart at this link:

http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2011/1/4/1912914/custom-woba-and-linear-weights-through-2010-baseball-databank-data

 

I guess so, in the same way that someone "decided" to use hits and at-bats to come up with batting average.

It's a figure based upon the actual average value of an event in a baseball game. I'm not saying that announcers and writers should start citing it all the time. But it's interesting, and its methodology is sound. Sounder than WAR, which was the original reason I brought it up.

 

OK. But those things tend to get jacked around just enough to "prove" Trout was more valuable than Cabrera, for instance.

Again: What's the value of wOBA over OPS in helping the mass audience determine what kind of year a guy is having?

 

No. Batting average measures exactly what it claims to measure. You can question how much that means, but the numbers are the numbers.

When you start getting into values based choices, that is more subjectivity than I care for in a statistic. I'm not saying it can't be useful. Just pointing to a difference in wOBA and OPS, for example.