More Baseball Stuff

This post is about baseball, if you do not want to read it, well then I am sorry, I have locked your browser and this will be the only screen available for the next 15 minutes…

Over the last year or two I have been looking at many of the alternative statistics, which many baseball fans do not either A) Know about, or B) Understand. I get flack from these people because they just do not believe that certain players are better than what they thought, or worse than they thought. Whatever.

The one stat I enjoy, and wish more people used/understood, is VORP: Value Over Replacement Player. This is a great stat for when someone says “they may not have great numbers, but PlayerX wins games for you.” Well you can look at VORP and see if that is really true (another stat similar is WARP). For example, last year Kenji Johjima’s VORP was 24.0, Jason Varitek’s was 2.8. This helped in evaluating which player to draft in my league (as well as the fact that Johjima was still available in the 7th round mostly because someone took Varitek in the 6th. You can also look at the projected 2007 seasons through PECOTA on the mentioned links. The different projection systems are fairly accurate and should not be tossed aside. Anyways, my point on VORP is, someone (mostly an idiot Red Sox fan) will say how Varitek is much valuable than Johjima is for the Mariners, and there is a stat that really tells you whether that is true. Unfortunately it does not take into account leadership skills, such as playing catch with younger players, and giving pep talks in the locker room.

Sorry about that little rant, if you guys want a good laugh, go to FJM’s glossary of terms.

Also, on FJM today they rip apart an article about guys who do not hit homers. It is pretty funny, especially this line:
“The way this guy talks about home runs, you almost start to forget it’s the single most valuable thing you can ever do when you are standing at the plate short of knocking Johan Santana out of the game by hitting him in the face with the ball.”

Well that is it for me today, I definitely recommend Pirates fans going over to WHYGAVS and the NLCentral FanHouse.

Author: Ngewo