Diamond Mind Baseball Statistics Guide: Individual Batting
Looking at the batting stats
Diamond Mind Baseball Statistics Guide: Batting
Here’s part two of my supplemental guide to the Diamond Mind Baseball help file. Let’s jump right in.
We’ll start this one off by looking at individual batting leaders, which will help give us a clue as to what the abbreviations mean on the team statistics pages.
Basic Individual Batting
Batting Average: The number of hits divided by the number of at bats. Traditionally, this was the most trusted hitting statistic in baseball. Many traditionally minded baseball fans still consider it to be meaningful, though most sabermetricans are dismissive of it.
On-base Percentage: The number of times a player has reached base divided by his plate appearances. At-bats, as traditionally calculated, don’t take into account things like walks. On-base percentage is a much more accurate measure of what percentage of the time a hitter is likely to reach base in any given plate appearance.
Here is the formula for calculating it using traditional baseball counting statistics (i.e. before “plate appearances” were a thing):
Slugging Percentage: Total bases divided by at bats. The total bases component of this formula weighs it in a way that promotes power hitting, as you can see:
In theory, the highest slugging percentage you can achieve is 4.000, which would happen if you hit one home run in every at bat.
Hits: Number of hits
Runs: Number of runs
Runs batted in: Tally of the number of runs a player’s offensive efforts have caused to score. Players receive credit for a run batted in when a runner scores as a result of a ball the player hit. Additionally, players can receive credit for a run batted in as a result of a bunt or sacrifice fly. Grounding into a double play does not generate a “run batted in” even if a run scores as a result. It’s complicated. Wikipedia has a good explanation.
Doubles: Number of doubles
Triples: Number of triples
Homeruns: Number of home runs.
Extra base hits: Doubles plus triples plus home runs.
Stolen bases: List of the number of bases stolen, as well as the number of times the player has been caught attempting to steal.
Steal percentage: Percentage of stolen base attempts that were successful
Walks: Number of walks
Intentional walks: Number of times the player was walked intentionally.
Strikeouts: Number of strikeouts
Advanced Individual Batting
Some of these are simple; others are not so simple.
Sacrifice bunts: Number of successful sacrifice bunts.
Sacrifice flies: Number of sacrifice flies. Note that a sacrifice fly is only successful if a runner moves up to the next base.
Hit by pitch: Number of times hit by pitch
Ground ball DP: Number of times grounded into a double play. I’m not sure why Diamond Mind Baseball doesn’t just call this GIDP (for Grounded Into Double Play), which is the common notation.
Runs Created: Okay, here we go. Runs created is a secondary statistic created by Bill James. It’s meant to be a measure of a player’s offensive ability — sort of like what people used to think batting average meant, but much more logically sound.
Wikipedia, as usual, has an excellent explanation. The idea behind Runs Created is this:
That leads to a host of different formulas, designed to be used in different circumstances when different statistics are present. The “technical” version of Runs Created looks like this:
Again, don’t ask me where the precise decimals .26 and .52 come from. As is usually the case in sabermetrics, their origin seems pretty obscure and somewhat arbitrary. There are other aspects that strike me as arbitrary, such as using the same numerical modifier for sacrifice hits, sacrifice flies, and stolen bases, subtracting intentional walks, and applying more negative weight to caught stealing than positive weight to stolen bases. I haven’t spent the time yet to really dig into this, though I will before long.
Diamond Mind Baseball uses this “technical” version. From the help file:
We’ll talk more about Runs Created later, once I’ve had time to really dig in.
Runs created / 27 outs
This is a statistic developed to tell you how many runs per game (or per 27 outs) a team would create if they had nothing but clones of your player. It’s one of a variety of statistics that have been developed to come close to an offensive winning percentage for individual players, which is a concept I consider to be of very limited logical utility.
Again, from the Diamond Mind Baseball help file:
Isolated Power: Slugging percentage minus batting average. This tells you how many extra bases a player averages per at bat.
Total Average: A statistic developed by sportswriter Thomas Boswell that treats all bases as equal. Here’s the formula:
It’s basically another attempt to give players credit for drawing walks. I’m not sure why we need this alongside On-base Percentage, other than the fact that it also gives a nod to players with stolen bases. You don’t see this stat all that often these days.
Total Bases: As described above, this is the total number of bases a player’s offense has generated. It’s singles + 2(Doubles) + 3(Triples) + 4(Home Runs). Again, it’s hard to understand why this is an important stat when we already have slugging percentage.
On-base plus slugging: It’s a sum of a player’s on-base percentage and slugging percentage. This is a pretty simple stat that correlates well with both Runs Created and actual runs scored. Before WAR started dominating every conversation, On-base plus slugging (or OPS) dominated baseball conversations online.
Secondary Average: It’s a measure of the extra bases a player gets without taking singles into account. The formula gives you an example of what we’re talking about:
Again, it’s not entirely certain to me what utility knowing this stat brings with it, aside from figuring out what good players with low batting averages do. I’d consider Slugging Percentage to be much better in that regard.
AB per homerun: At bats per home run, where lower is better. This gives you an idea of how often a player hits a home run.
Atbats: Number of at bats. Players hitting higher in the batting order will usually have higher totals.
Plate appearances: Number of plate appearances a player has. Players hitting higher in the batting order will have more plate appearances.
Games: Number of games a player has played in. I’m not sure why this is a leaderboard stat.
Current hit streak: Length of the player’s current hitting streak in terms of games. This stat is mostly popular among those who think fondly of Joe DiMaggio hitting in 56 consecutive games in 1941.
Longest hit streak: The longest hitting streak a player has had this season.
Game-winning RBI: A long-discarded attempt to measure “clutch hitting,” this is a measure of runs batted in that gave the player’s team a lead the team never relinquished. I don’t think anybody takes this statistic seriously anymore, as Wikipedia indicates.
More Advanced Stats
Yeah, there’s more. Some of these are really obscure.
Total bases + BB + HBP: Walks and times hit by pitch don’t count towards total bases for some dumb reason. This fixes that problem.
TB+BB+HBP rate: The above statistic divided by plate appearances. Sort of like a mix between slugging percentage and on-base percentage — and another statistic of unknown utility.
Plate appearances per game: Number of plate appearances a player has in each game. Again, this is largely a reflection of where the player hits in the batting order.
Total bases plus walks: Similar to above, but without times hit by pitch.
TB+BB rate: Again, similar to the TB+BB+HBP rate, but without times hit by pitch. And, yes, I don’t know why you would care to know this.
AB per game: At-bats per game. Similar to plate appearances, this is likely to be influenced by the player’s spot in the batting order. Note that walks do not count as at bats, which is why Ted Williams’ name disappears in the above list.
Balls in park: Number of balls put in play that were not home runs.
In-play average: This measures how frequently a batter reaches base on balls put in play that are not home runs. I believe this is the same as Batting Average on Balls In Play (BABIP), which is usually used as a pitching statistic.
Strikeout/walk ratio: Number of strikeouts per walk. A low number means the player strikes out infrequently but walks frequently.
I’ll bring you the team statistics next time in what will hopefully be a somewhat shorter post.
Daniel, thanks for the explanation of DMB's individual offensive stats. However, it's worth noting that the history of sacrifice flies is somewhat complicated.
From 1900-1907 there were no sacrifice flies.
From 1908-1925 scoring flies were counted as sacrifice hits along with sacrifice bunts.
From 1926-1930 any fly ball that advanced a baserunner, whether the runner scored or not, was counted as a sacrifice hit along with sacrifice bunts. That's one of the reasons that batting averages were so high during that period.
From 1931-1938 there were no sacrifice flies.
In 1939, scoring fly balls were counted as sacrifice hits along with sacrifice bunts.
From 1940-1953, there were no sacrifice flies. I should note that in the actual 1949 season that you're replaying there were, in fact, no sacrifice flies.
From 1954 to the present, run scoring fly outs were attributed by the specific and separate stat "sacrifice fly."
The DMB help section describes these rules in detail and the game itself has a drop-down that permits the player to set the sacrifice rule being used in any specific season replay.