Meta-Primer on wOBA

This is my favorite primer of the past, oh, 78 days. Yes, Colin eventually discusses the wOBA formula, but the majority of his article is about what matters on offense (which everybody knows, intuitively), why current stats fail to measure it accurately (which everyone knows, intuitively, once you point it out) and why wOBA does it the right way.

You don't convince people that a formula is right by showing them the nitty-gritty details (a "proof", if you will). You convince them by demonstrating you know what you're talking about and that your thought process makes sense. Then skip the sausage-making and instead let them taste the sausage.

(I just set myself up for an avalanche of sausage jokes, didn't I? Crap.)

Hat tip: Tango.

over 2 years ago Sky Kalkman 4 comments 0 recs |

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BtB

“Where you can taste as much sausage as you like.”

I don’t know, maybe it needs some work. It might be a little hard to swallow.

Thanks for the link. I am going to send that to some of my old-school stat-inclined friends.

/auto-defenestrates

Dear Internet,
Please fire Brian Sabean.
Signed,
Me

FREE KEVIN FRANDSEN!!! Member of the Frandsen 5% Club.

by Uribe nee Gonzalez on Feb 19, 2010 8:09 PM EST reply actions

One change I'd make is in addressing why OPS misses the boat.

True, there’s the denominator problem. And you need to weight OBP more. But it’s not because OBP is more important (as shown by regressing OBP and SLG against team scoring). It’s because one point of OBP means more than 1 point of SLG. Basically, you need to spread OBP values out so that a gap of 1 point of adjusted OBP means as much as 1 point of SLG.

And then I’d talk about how (if you ignore denominators), you’re basically doing…

OPS
= OBP + SLG
= times on base + total bases
= (BB + 1B + 2B + 3B + HR) + (1B + 2×2B + 3×3B + 4xHR)
= BB + 2×1B + 3×2B + 4×3B + 5xHR

That’s obviously not a bad estimate, but is a HR really worth five times as much as a walk? Is a triple twice as good as a 1B? Isn’t it just a little too convenient that the relative worth of these events lines up like this? Wouldn’t it be nice to know how valuable each thing is to the others, exactly? Whoila, linear weights and wOBA.

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by Sky Kalkman on Feb 19, 2010 11:14 PM EST reply actions