Bill James On The Merits Of Certain Stats

What do you think?

Bill James On The Merits Of Certain Stats

As I continue to work behind the scenes on numerous deep dives, I discovered this interesting note from this summary of the 1978 Bill James Baseball Abstract:

It turns out that our opinions on certain subjects wind up being far more interesting than the subjects or formulas themselves as time goes on. Any old fool can look at something like a month-by-month breakdown of a season, for example. Knowing what James thinks about these stats, though, is completely different.

A few notes on these specific stats:

Month-by-month breakdowns is a stat that I don’t see cited all that often these days, though it’s obviously pretty significant, especially at the team level. I suspect that James was a fan of it in part because the Kansas City Royals at the time were known for starting slow in April and May before kicking into high gear during the summer months.

Team age analysis is extremely important, as any OOTP player will tell you. If the age of your players looks like the 1983 Phillies, you’re probably not going to do so well.

Defensive efficiency record was a good step in the right direction, though it’s since been surpassed.

Come from behind records strikes me as one of those many attempts to measure “clutch.” I doubt it tells us anything significant.

I’m not sure what opposition errors refers to — perhaps errors that your offense pushed the opposing defense into committing? I think this was likely relevant during the days of aggressive baserunning. However, errors are so rare these days that I doubt this stat would tell us much. Even the 2024 White Sox didn’t commit all that many errors, as I learned a few days ago while I was sifting through footage.

Opposition stolen base records are relevant, though some correctly note that it’s not sure if the catcher or pitcher is to blame.

Pitcher run support is a lot more important than James seems to claim.

Pitcher double play support is one of those things that we don’t look into very much. I assume this is because we’ve concluded that pitchers can’t actually influence whether the ball is hit on the ground or in the air.

Attendance by pitchers really was never all that important, with a few well known historical exceptions. The truth is that historic attendance figures (especially before the advent of night baseball) has a lot more to do with the day of the week and whether it was a holiday than anything else. I’ll talk about this more once I’m done compiling data on the time games started during the deadball era.

Game times are indeed significant, and yet have somehow fallen away from how we evaluate pitchers.

Three hit games sounds like a bunch of statistical noise.

Umpiring statistics are all the rage on Twitter, though the difference between the best and the worst likely falls into that definition of statistical noise.

Isolated power is important, of course — and it’s interesting to know that Branch Rickey invented the term.

Range factor is also important when it comes to looking at defense, though, again, it’s been surpassed by better defensive measures.

What do you think?