Pythagorean stat overload
"A baseball fan has the digestive apparatus of a billy goat. He can, and does, devour any set of statistics with insatiable appetite and then nuzzles hungrily for more."
– Sports writer Arthur Daley
Don’t we have enough baseball stats already? It seems like every season, I’m watching a game and an announcer throws out an acronym I’ve never heard before.
RISP, anybody? (That’s a stat for hitting with runners in scoring position. The stat's not new. But this one-syllable word has caught fire over the past couple of years.)
"I don't understand. All of a sudden, it's not just BA and Runs Scored, it's OBA. And what is with O-P-S?"
– Former ESPN Analyst Harold Reynolds
As a teenager, I spent several years asking every baseball fan I knew to explain what slugging percentage was. Either they had no answer or they just made up something. “It’s the percentage of hits that are homers,” I remember one friend telling me. He lied. He didn't know what it was either. (I later learned it was total bases divided by at bats.)
But I recently discovered a new statistic: Pythagorean expectation, or Pythagorean won-loss record. It wasn’t invented by Pythagoras of Samos, but baseball writer, historian and statistician Bill James.
Here’s the formula:
(Runs Scored)^1.83
---------------------------------------------------------
(Runs Scored)^1.83 + (Runs Allowed)^1.83
The objective is to determine if a team was lucky or unlucky. In the example above, the 1977 Yankees were a smidge lucky, winning 100 games when they supposedly should have won 99. The ’98 Yanks should have won 108, instead of 114, the formula determines.
My head hurts.
I beg the math nerds: FOR THE LOVE OF THE GAME, PLEASE STOP THIS MADNESS! There are too many stats, and call me a purist, but I always thought actual won-loss record was a pretty good indicator of how good a team was. (Not to mention, I could keep up with that math; I only needed to know how to add by one after each game.)
But I guess on the bright side, when my hypothetical children toss their algebra or geometry books to the side, and argue, “I’m never going to use this stuff in life,” I’ll honestly be able to say, by that point, that understanding the World Series will be impossible without a master’s degree in engineering.
“Baseball statistics are like a girl in a bikini. They show a lot, but not everything.”
- Former Washington Senator Toby Harrah
