Fun With Sabermetrics - Day 2 - ERA+

Sup, boners. Let's get right into it because I'm about to go to Jamba Juice.

ERA+ or Adjusted ERA

Another pretty heavily-weighed stat, this time for pitchers, obvi. It's basically a pitcher's ERA adjusted for ballpark (whether the ballpark is a hitter's park or a pitcher's park) and for the average ERA for the league the pitcher's in. Essentially it takes pitchers who throw in pitcher's parks and pitchers who throw in hitter's parks and plops 'em smack on an even playing field. So let's say a pitcher has an ERA of 4.0 in a hitters park where the league avg. is 4.0. He'd have an ERA+ of 100. For ERA+, 100 is the league average. So you got yourself a pretty average pitcher.

To the formula. To find ERA+ you take the league ERA, multiply that by the home park factor, multiply that by 100, then divide by the pitcher's ERA.

Confusing right? If only there was a player we could use as an example. Oh I know. How 'bout newest Rangers pitcher and recipient of a brand new robot arm, Brandon Webb!

B-Webb had 2 absolutely beast years in his last 2 full seasons. Let's take the most recent, 2008. Webb had an ERA of 3.3 while going 22-7 on the year for the D-Backs. So. According to baseball-reference.com, the '08 ERA avg. for the NL was 4.29. Now Chase Field in AZ is a big time hitter's park. In fact in '08 the only park that batters hit better in was, hi-o, Rangers' Ballpark in Arlington, home of your 2010 American League Champion Texas Rangers. Chase had a park factor of 1.135 in 2008. So 4.29 x 1.135 x 100 is 487, divide that by his ERA of 3.30, and KERSPLAT. You have a beastly ERA+ of 147, meaning he was 47% better than the average NL pitcher in 2008.

Some other notable pitchers with awesome ERA+, that douchebag closer in New York who gets to wear number 42 even though it's retired across the league has the best ERA+ in a career at 202 but who cares because he's gonna die in a fiery inferno tonight. Pedro's mystical 2000 season carried an ERA+ of a ridiculous 291. And Tim Keefe, whose name I only mention because it rhymes with queef, set the alltime record in 1880 with an ERA+ of 294, but that was back before the invention of sabermetrics or television or paper or dinosaurs.

So. There.

-Me.

Fun With Sabermetrics - Day 1 - BABIP

Welcome to Fun With Sabermetrics because I'm bored and have had a baseball boner for so long I need to call that hotline that Cialis gives out at the end of their commercials. These posts will consist of me walking you amateurs through Sabermetrics. As you might not know because you're busy going to college and getting jobs while I'm busy looking at the 1987 Texas Rangers box scores, "Sabermetrics is the analysis of baseball through objective evidence, especially baseball statistics that measure in-game activity rather than industry activity such as attendance." I know, right? It's dumb. It's over-analysis. But it's kind of cool, and you heard it here first: it's going to get big. In the next decade you're going to start seeing a lot more of this, because it's actually pretty accurate shit.

So let's start out easy.

BABIP - Batting Average on Balls In Play

Pretty much the quintessential stat for every day hitters, it basically measures the amount of base hits a player has for every time they hit a playable ball. So no home runs, remember that. Many say it's a statistic of luck, but that's bullsh. A hit is a hit is a hit, and the ability to get good bat on the ball isn't luck. Formula is as follows:

So in the words of Double Rainbow Guy, "What does this mean?" Well shut up for a second and let me tell you. Using someone we all know and want to be inside of love.

Elvis' is pretty easy to calculate, because he doesn't strike out a lot and he totaled ZERO for both HRs and SFs in 2010.

So. For '10 his standard BA was .265. 156 hits, basic math tells us that's the numerator. 588 at-bats minus 96 Ks equals 492, your denumerator or whatever the hell it's called. 156 divided by 492, bam, you got a BABIP of .317 for Mr Andrus, meaning almost 32 percent of all balls put into the diamond by Elvis will fall for base hits. The over/under for the league is about .300, so Elvis is a bit above the average, most likely due to his speed and the ability to beat out BIP that the fatass Milwaukee Brewers first-basemens of the world wouldn't be able to.

So there you have it. BABIP. Go take on the world.

Excuse my mood.

I think the title alone explains it perfectly.

"I know you niggas aimin, i see you muggin hard, you can't deny me, they all salute the underdog."