Baseball Needs Stats Based On Winning Games
As I’m sitting here watching today’s Red Sox game against the Astros, the NESN broadcasters were opining something along the lines of, “Can you imagine being told earlier this year that in August we’d have players with top OPS and Chris Sale pitching but be in this position?”
My immediate thought was: well, those numbers have basically nothing to do with winning games.
What I mean is this: all baseball stats seem to record some set of data pertaining to individual achievement. Technically, you could have a player with one-hundred home runs on the season, but if they all came in losses, who the fuck cares?
So, I need some new stats in baseball.
Specifically, I want stats that record a player’s “contribution to wins”. For example, something that tells me the degree to which a player’s on-base percentage has contributed to winning games. Similarly, something that tells me the degree to which a player’s fielding percentage contributed to winning games.
By default, we’d also get a sense of to what degree a player is contributing to losing games, either at the plate or in the field.
In the end, these are actually the only stats that matter: is this player contributing to the winning of baseball games, or not? Everything else is the cult of personality and just so much noise.