It is my belief that baseball knowledge should neither be limited to insiders nor to baseball writers. I don’t think that numbers are for nerds, that you should tell someone how to enjoy the game of baseball, or that numbers are everything.

Numbers are just what I make educated baseball opinions on, and something I want my team to heavily consider when they make major baseball decisions.

The point of this blog isn’t to scare you with numbers, or say that you are in fact, stupid, regardless of what my sig says.

The point of this blog is to free you from the shackles of a media that is driven towards laziness, instead of facing up to cold, hard analytical fact. I love the poetry of baseball, the beauty of it. I just also understand that small sample sizes are not the way to evaluate talent.

You should understand too. Baseball fans are too quick to fall in love with the mediocre, to anoint ESPN’s flavor of the week as baseball royalty. We are all guilty of it, I was when I almost wanted to give Andres Blanco the gold glove over Orlando Hudson at the midway point.

So with all that said, remember these few rules.

1. Small sample sizes suck!

We’ve all seen them, most of all the Cubs. The Cubs overreacted to a 6 game sample, hit the panic button, and said that they needed to get more left handed…with Milton Bradley. More on that in a different rule.

Small sample sizes just don’t cut it when it comes to evaluating baseball. They play 162 games a year, and there will be some bad spells in that time. Players will play poorly and they will play greatly, but players are not the streaks, they are the sum of those streaks at the end of a long season. Just because Sam Fuld had a .500 OBP for 3 games does not mean that he is the greatest lead off hitter ever.

2. Context is king in the world of baseball

Player A hits .314 Player B hits .357. Who is better? A, B, or I don’t know?

If you answered “I don’t know,” go get yourself a cookie. because you don’t know without the proper context. I hate it when people say that when seriously discussing baseball talent. (BTW, Player A is Albert Pujols in 2002, Player B is Ivan Cruz, same year. Cruz only played 17 games).

Context is the most important part of baseball analysis, and it will be a huge part of this blog. We all look at averages and HRs from Coors differently than we would from Petco. That is an example of context. The more context the better.

3. No one stat is perfect, nor is one stat the be-all, end-all

This goes along with context in a way but needs to be separate. Look, I grew up with baseball cards, and when I was really, really young, I could tell that batting average wasn’t everything. I could tell that HRs don’t tell the whole story.

You can too, it’s just that our minds have been pre programmed to follow along with stats that haven’t really been updated since 1880. There is no one stat, not even VORP or WARP, that should be the only stat people use. We are speaking a language when we talk baseball, and we should treat it as such, with stats being the words.

4. Intangibles are overrated, but sometimes they carry merit in rare cases

Clutch. God I hate that word. It’s a cliche used by lazy sports writers when they don’t have anything better to say most of the time. Other times it applies. For example, there are clutch situations, but there are far less clutch players than people think.

Derek Jeter hits .316/.387/.458 During the Regular Season, but hits .309/.377/.469 in the Playoffs. Which looks exactly the same. Derek Jeter does not become some sort of superhuman hit machine in the playoffs, he just becomes…well, Derek Jeter.

Caveat, Bob Gibson was clutch, and Don Drysdale was a damn choker. But those are outliers, exceptions that prove the rule.

5. Until the new technology takes a firm foothold, defense will always be near impossible to truly measure

UZR had Alfonso Soriano rated as a plus LFer last year. I know he throws out a ton of guys, but he is not a plus LFer. Not at all, not even a little bit. That’s the last frontier, folks, and it’s about to get explored.

6. Scouting will always have a place in baseball

I love numbers, I love looking at them and I love that baseball is starting to accept them.

They are not the only thing, though. Good scouting still has a place in baseball, and it always will.

7. There are team dependent stats in the individual stat numbers

The most famous being Wins, RBI, and RS. Wins are team dependent, a team wins a game, not a pitcher. We all know this, its just that our brains shut off the logic part whenever it comes to baseball. In football the QB is far more important than an SP in baseball, but no one really cares about QB wins honestly. They care about performance. The same should hold true in baseball.

RBI and RS are different though, RBIs are overrated while RSes are a tad underrated. You can learn more from Runs scored than you can from Runs Batted In, i.e. you can grasp how good a base runner someone is with RSes. Both are team dependent however.


So there you have it.

This Magna Carta is an introductory set of rules to remember whenever you do baseball analysis. Don’t be duped by simplistic analysis from either the broadcast booth, the newspaper or the talking heads on various sports channels. They often appeal to the simple rather than get into the meat of baseball.

Remember, don’t end up like Joe Morgan.