Stats Glossary
Most of the stats discussed on this blog are either from Baseball-Reference.com or Fangraphs.com.
Here are a few of the stats quite commonly mentioned:
- WAR stands for Wins Above Replacement and is a measure of how many wins a player was worth as compared to a replacement-level player. The exact method of determining WAR is complex, and it differs between B-R.com and Fangraphs. Commonly on this site, then, you may see the designations bWAR and fWAR if the numbers are drawn from one of those two particular web sites.
- OPS is on-base percentage plus slugging percentage. OPS+ is a normalized version of OPS that takes into account both the league-wide average OPS as well as the player’s home ballpark. A value of 100 is considered league-average, while over 100 is better than average.
- ERA+ is similar to OPS+ in that it has been normalized to the league-wide average ERA and the player’s ballpark. 100 is average, while over 100 is better than average.
Game Score (explanation taken from B-R page here):
- This is a value created by Bill James that evaluates how good a pitcher’s start was.
Start with 50 points. Add 1 point for each out recorded, (or 3 points per inning). Add 2 points for each inning completed after the 4th. Add 1 point for each strikeout. Subtract 2 points for each hit allowed. Subtract 4 points for each earned run allowed. Subtract 2 points for each unearned run allowed. Subtract 1 point for each walk.
Please add any requests in the comments below for more terms to be explained here.
You’ve got a typo on “Fangraphs” in the first bullet point. Love the new website Andy!
Thank you, fixed.
Consider separating the entries with a hard return. Easier on the eyes. If you don’t want all that empty space, you could put a bullet at the beginning of each entry.
Whatever you do, this glossary is a terrific idea!
Bullets are broken for some reason…trying to get them fixed. We had this problem on B-R too.
Oh yeah…bullets are fixed now.
Why is HHS using the bWAR name rather than the more common rWAR name that gives proper credit to the creator rather than the distributor? I don’t remember even B-R referring to it as bWAR.
I’m not even aware of the history of that stat–can you provide a link? If I’m drawing numbers from B-R’s site, it seems appropriate to flag them with the ‘b’ to make it clear what the source is.
I don’t think their is one page that I could link to that would explain the history of WAR, rWAR, etc. But I can say that for many years Rally hosted his own WAR database using his own formulas. http://baseballprojection.com/war/playerindex.htm
He stopped updating this two years ago when B-R started hosting it. Actually I just found the link with the announcement. http://www.baseball-reference.com/blog/archives/6063 As you can see B-R is using Sean Smith’s (aka Rally) WAR data. Confirmation from Tango: http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/comments/rwar_v_fwar_no_rwar_fwar/#21
Although I was surprised to see a bunch of results for bWAR baseball it was still only half of the google results for rWAR baseball.
I guess ultimately either is appropriate and bWAR might be less confusing to newcomers since it’s always in reference to fWAR but I thought that it should be noted that rWAR was the original name, the more common name, gives proper credit to the creator and is used more by “insiders”/writers.
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