Beyond the Highschool Box Score

On the HS, college and professional levels compiling of sabermetric stats doesnt really help you too much in acheiving your main goal, which is teaching the game and winning.

On the scouting and minor league side of things, a lot of times those numbers dont really mean a lot because you need to have correct context for them all, and at that level its more about tools and development, than production.

And in the HS and college games, those numbers dont really help you out that much at all because of the unpredictability of the game at those levels. And then the ability of players also comes into play as well. Having great stats, or even great sabermetric stats might be fun to track for a player,but if they compiled in a league where there is one really good program, a couple of average ones, and the rest arent very good at all, what can that tell you?

I think it could be a fun excercise for you, but in the end you probably arent going to find any sort of discernable advantage through doing it. At the very least maybe you turn your players into smarter fans down the road.

and have been studying sabermetrics ever since. This is a very intriguing conversation as I love to coach and have had the same thoughts about applying sabermetric principles to other leagues.

However, (and I cannot believe I am saying this) I do agree with BtC about compiling stats. HS baseball has just too much flux and the skill level between individual teams and players is just too great. You can have a couple of D1 players playing against a couple of college club team bench players, and I don’t think that helps a lot. Regardless of advanced stats, you know that those D1 kids are probably going to do much better a vast majority of the time.

In contrast, I believe there are still many principles you can take away from sabermetrics. I have always wondered how an optimized lineup for my HS team would have fared against the random lineup our coach was throwing out there (or so it seemed). However, 22 games + playoffs (that’s what we play in NJ) is such a small sample size and if looking at MLB data over years (thousands of games) is supposed to give us good data, it will take quite a few years to come to any statistical conclusions.

Bringing in your best reliever in the situation with the highest leverage instead of closing out the 7th inning might be something to look into. Bunting is tough because outs are far less valuable in HS baseball than in the pros, but I’m sure some teams should still bunt less.

http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/comments/the_book_high_school_edition/

Maybe we’d find something eventually.