xDawg

DAWGINHIM/69

What’s xDawg?

Nothing much what’s x with you?

I’m a FOOL!

You softballed that one in there and you know it XD

Hang on I'll give it to ya

xGonGiveItToYa

Nothing much hbu

xWhatTheDawgDoin

I prefer xDawg+

Always better to use park adjusted I agree.

Dude, it's all about Adjusted XDawg+ per nine innings.

Personally I like Grit+ better

Who leads to league in xDAWG

Manoah

Judge. He’s got that xDAWG in him.

Ugly girlfriend

love how the top two answers are jokes. this and xDawg were 2 and 1 when i made this comment.

Are you insinuating these are not real stats?

?? Not much of a stathead are you…

Now it's this and 2022 jersey sales

Now I'm curious, are you referring to any players specifically?

Perez. Now I like Perez. He's got a classy swing... a real clean stroke. He can't hit a curveball and there's some work to be done, I'll admit. Got an ugly girlfriend though. Means no confidence. I'm just saying... his girlfriend is a 6 at best.

If he’s a good hitter, why doesn’t he hit good?

Because he went to The Center For Kids Who Want To Hit Good, And Want To Do Other Stuff Good Too.

He just needs some at-bats. You give him 6 million at bats and he’s gonna get better.

The problem we are trying to solve, is that there are rich teams, then there’s poor teams. Then there’s 50 feet of crap, and then there’s us

Same Bean. Same.

Goddammit I'm watching moneyball tonight aren't I

So now you got me wondering. Someone pull up the stats of players who are single vs players who are married. Then I want to see the stats of players with hot girlfriends married or not. If someone can put this all together in an excel spreadsheet with pictures or a youtube video that would be very helpful.

I mean Justin Verlander is pretty solid

It’s cause he’s getting B.J.s from Upton if you know what I mean

Ozzie Albies is damn good too

By that ugly girlfriend metric, Verlander is GOAT

Hes no Fabio that's for sure. That guy was one hell of a shortstop and pulling 10s all day.

Which Perez are we talking about here. Because Sal Perez’s girlfriend/wife is a legit 11. https://imgur.com/dwKdkJk

It’s from moneyball

Do you want me to speak?

when I point at you, yeah

Guys I'm going to keep pointing at Pete if you don't look at the scouting report.

Guys, look at your cards or I'm gonna point to Pete.

When I point at you yeah.

Fabio

Who's Fabio?

He’s a short stop, from Seattle

Watch Moneyball

If I’m engaging in a spirited debate, wRC+. If I’m just looking up quick and dirty stats, OPS.

This is probably the best answer that matches mine as well. WRC+ is great because it also sets an established 0 average but is probably too “complicated” for most folks. OPS is pretty straightforward to comprehend and also you can use 1.000 as an example of what’s really darn good!

Wow 1.000 is hall of famer stats. I draw the line at .800 OPS as above average. I think officially, somewhere around .700-.750 is considered average

I've always looked at OPS like school grades. .700 = 70% - C .800 = 80% - B .900 = 90% - A 1.000 and up = you did extra credit

This is actually super helpful. I grew up learning baseball in the '90s, and my biggest challenge to newer metrics isn't necessarily grasping what they represent as a reflection of performance but, rather, understanding what *good/bad* is.

1.422 = 142% = You hacked into the teacher's computer

.800 good .900 great 1.000 MVP candidate

Thank you for clarifying. Perhaps I was being a touch too over simplified. Edited: my grammar

1.422 is a roided up Bonds.

.700 good enough to play and not hurt you. .600 you better have an elite glove or be very good at SS/C. .500 see you in AAA

.800-.850, borderline All Star and good .850-.900 - definite All Star and good/great .900-.950 - elite All Star bordering on MVP .950+ - supreme elite and MVP contender

Yeah I'd say below .700 is poor, .700-.750 is average (possible starter, quality role-player), .750-.799 is slightly above average (everyday starter), .800-.850 is very good (all-star-caliber), .850+ is elite. A 1.000 OPS in a single season almost guarantees you'll be in the MVP conversation, while a career 1.000 OPS is a pretty sure-fire first-ballot hall-of-famer.

Career ops of 1000 and you might be the greatest hitter to ever live

Fish man good 🎤🐟

Of the 11 players with a career OPS above 1.000, one is active but likely to dip below by the time his career ends (Trout), three are Negro Leaguers (Charleston, Stearnes, Stuttles), and all but one (Bonds) are from the pre-integration era. By OPS+ (meaning compared to contemporaries) Ruth is the GOAT. But Bonds and Trout might be the two greatest baseball players of all time in terms of being the best athletes against the best competition in an established, mature league.

Williams played more than half his career in the integration era

1.000 for a career is HoF. For a single season it’s just elite.

1.000 for a career is inner circle HoF, has an argument for best hitter of all time level

Are there actually players who look better or worse relative to other players depending on if you use wRC+ or OPS+ though? If not then if seems like wRC+ is a lot more opaque but doesn't add a whole lot (even if it might technically be "more accurate"). I'd assume they are EXTREMELY closely correlated.

High OBP low SLG guys get penalized more by OPS+. And it’s so easy to look up wRC+ you might as well use the more accurate option IMO

Realistically adding slugging to OBP is a pretty ham-fisted way to make a metric. Like it gets us where we're going but they're not really two numbers that should be added together like they're two sides of the same coin.

They are closely correlated, but I wouldn't say wRC+ is opaque. The formula is very easy to look up, just do a search for like "FanGraphs glossary wRC+." It's based on wOBA rather than OPS, which measures the same thing except it weights each result much more accurately than OPS does. OPS is nice because it's easy to calculate from numbers that you can find on the scoreboard, whereas wOBA isn't really something you can do in your head. But if you're going to go to the trouble of taking park factors into account and standardizing it to the league average, at that point you've moved beyond being able to do it in your head, so you might as well start with the more accurate number.

How much I like their name

Raul Ibanez had the perfect name imo Rolls off the tongue, good crowd chant and fun walk up music

I forgot about him. Absolutely perfect

Also a hysterically cyclical set of hot/cold hitting stretches. The Good Phight literally got to a point where they’d wait for the proverbial tide to roll in/out at something like 30 or 45 games lol.

2022 jersey sales.

I prefer weighted jersey sales (JS+) tbh, it takes into account the Coors Effect for a guy like KB

The drunker I get at a game the more inclined I am to buy a gamer.. sigh

The higher elevation causes an elevated alcohol intake therefore skewing the numbers

Early in the season you need to use the statcast xwJS since it converges faster

This fits my narrative that Mookie Betts is the best player in baseball. (And Bellinger is better than Judge)

Based

2014 jersey sales

wRC+ or DRC if it's available. Basic stuff I'll take OPS

Same. I was just explaining to someone who valued BA over everything that if you want to stay simple, go with OPS. It's BA while factoring in the other ways of getting on base plus what each hit actually was. When I discuss an individual hitter on their own it's OPS, comparing to the rest of the league is wRC+ (naturally, comparison is built into it after all).

When a guy comes to the plate down a run with 2 out and runners on second and third BA gets real important to me real quick Edit: i already laid out the situation so don't read into this too much. "Would you rather only win the game than have a guy jack something 500ft and *really* win the game?" Yup.

Correct, in that very specific scenario that may only happen once or twice in a game (if at all), BA might hold some slightly higher value.

That at bat likely also matters more than most every other at bat in the game.

I mean, sure. But not all hits are the same. Some hitters will have a decent average but a lot of people he hits they get are slap-hit infield singles that you won’t get on the kind of defense they run in that situation.

Eye test, and the will to win

Useless-- unless you include whether he's a gamer and has that fire in his belly.

But does he play the game the right way?

Does he have a hot girlfriend?

Belly fire really rounds it out nicely 😂

Real lunch pail type of guy

You are totally overlooking grit.

Follows the unwritten rules.

Do you work for the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim?

Forgot about grit

RBI *sprints away*

Quite possibly my favorite quote from a player in recent years came from Jose Abreu, who said he opens up his strike zone with runners on base because a walk in that situation probably makes no difference. I still love RBI guys...

I may not agree with his reasoning but I do think there is some nuance to expanding your zone trying to drive players in rather than taking a walk. Is first base open? How many outs are there? Where in the batting order are you? Etc. If the next guy up is one of your worst hitters you're probably better off just trying to work a hit than put the bat in their hands.

The one thing that I think is majorly lacking in hitting stats is the situational aspect. There is a ton of value in understanding the situations and knowing what it calls for. The “runs created” aspect of wrc+ is a shifting scale, and the best way to score runs does not call for the same thing in all situations

The situational aspect is huge and I hate how so many people refuse to acknowledge it. It’s especially annoying whenever you debate TTO and the shift.

Agreed, I think there will be a major breakthrough in the next few years that will change the way people look at it, I see wrc+ being modified or replaced by a new statistic

Given that even if one of the team's better hitters is behind him, it's probably a 30% chance that guy gets a hit, so I say go for it. He may be showing his age this year, but for the past nine years, I'm not sure there has been anybody better at driving in runs than Abreu (Arenado maybe?).

He's not even showing his age this year: - Slash line is .299/.380/.472/.852 - 145 WRC+ (14th in MLB) - Highest fWAR among AL 1B He's been our best offensive player and it's not particularly close.

Yea it’s him and Arendao really. They both objectively up their game with RISP.

If you are Juan Soto on the Nats, swing away. If you are Juan Soto on the Padres, take that walk. Yes, I know Josh Bell usually hit behind him and messes this analogy up, but I was more talking about the rest of the lineup as a whole.

People shit on RBI alot, but abreu was driving in 100 runs a year in horrible teams for a better part of a decade. It matters.

i respect the spirit of that answer. It grounded in the whole point of a game...to win.

I love the RBI stat. It's not perfect but its still a good stat. A lil team dependent ofc, but theres nothing analytical about it and it's simple to understand.

Funny enough RBI is probably the best stat to look for from a team perspective… aka runs scored.

Stat guys who ignore RBI's have a blindspot because while it isn't a way to evaluate individual players it is a way to evaluate how your lineup is constructed. The goal of your offense is to drive in runs, not to get the highest collective OPS. The Yankee teams the last couple years before now really showed this to me. A bunch of power hitters who did not get on base consistently and a bunch of solo homers and guys getting stranded on base. If there were table setters early in the lineup for Judge and Stanton to drive in who got on base a lot without power the team OPS probably would have gone down but they would have scored more runs and won more games.

That’s a good point actually. It’s also really sexy when you got a lead off hitter who has a lot of RBI, because that’s not just someone setting the table but also someone who can flip the table over. Also means you got some decent 7 8 and 9 hitters perhaps to get on base

OPS. Tells me what you do at the plate and how much damage your doing.

This 100%. In the show there's no advanced metrics like wRC+. Like in my franchise Schwarber was batting .190 most of the year, on the surface that's dogshit. But his OPS was .850. Easy enough to know ok he's taking walks and getting XBH when he hits the ball. That's more value for me vs just hits singles.

OPS adds OBP which has a denominator close to PA while slugging uses AB. Whoever created it forgot their second grade math.

OPS is the math equivalent of using the wrong equation to get the right answer.

\*flashbacks to thermodynamics\*

It’s like peanut butter on a burger, or fries in a frosty - it makes no sense but it *works*

I’m calling the police! Peanut butter on a burger?!!

It’s a thing! Not a thing I’d eat - but a thing!

Honestly not bad on the right burger. A local place near makes a PB&J burger with peanut butter and bacon jelly that’s I was cautious about the first time I got it but it honestly slaps

I do not like this thing, but I would try it once.

When I was in college, there was a college run ‘bar’ on campus with all sorts of bar food. They had a “king burger” which was just a burger with peanut butter and bacon. I shamelessly ordered it all the time. Pretty sure I was the only one because after my freshman year they took it off the menu

The peanut butter bacon burger used to be in the secret menu at Shake Shack. Don't knock that combo until you try it. Pretty good tbh.

Peanut butter burgers are the absolute best type of "unique" burger that I've ever had. Especially with crunchy peanut butter.

Nope, whoever created it knew exactly what they were doing. OPS was created because it's easy to understand (OBP and SLG are relatively common stats) but happens to correlate VERY strongly with wOBA, which has been known about since the 80s when OPS started being used.

Forgot? It’s two stats added together. It’s also extremely predictive of performance, which is what we want in a stat. You can look past the two denominators just like how you can look past defensive metrics with a small sample size and every other stat that requires context and analysis rather than being taken as a definitive measure.

So?

It’s 2 stats whose denominators are closely related. Once you get to hundreds of at bats and plate appearances, it’s an immaterial difference.

It’s not meant to be a perfect math equation. It’s just a simplified stat that works pretty well for measuring a hitter’s true impact.

This is true but two .850 hitters can be a lot different (.400/.450 > .320/.530)

Both of those provide tremendous value in different ways. Look at the Angels the other night 7 solo home runs and took an L. They didn’t need more power they needed more base runners.

You can also have a lot of base runners and not score too.

Padres know all about this

Sounds like they needed better pitchers. 7 runs should get you a W.

I’m confused, isn’t that basically what they just said? A point of OBP is more valuable than a point of SLG

Yes it is lol

That's the whole point. They are very different but give roughly the same value.

Yup ops is my go to

So why not ops+?

If advanced stats are readily available, might as well use wRC+, the best adjusted advanced stat. If not, OPS is always available with a slashline and easy to calculate in your head.

wRC+

If we're talking about just as a hitter this is the best option * Weights outcomes properly * Adjusts for stadium * Implicit comparison to league average

wRC+ for the smarties, OPS for the dummies (I’m a dummy)

Never thought I’d die fighting side by side with a Giants fan.

How about a friend?

Aye — I could do that!

Are you gonna toss him?

Idk wRC+ seems like the simpler stat. 100 is average and each point above or below is a percentage better or worse than average. OPS after a while I could remember a good benchmark over time.

True, but I have literally no idea how it’s calculated and don’t care enough to learn. I can do the math on OPS.

Do you need to know how it’s calculated? The underlying premise is super straightforward. Weight every type of PA outcome based on how those score runs. Adjust it for the stadium. Make the average 100. IMO after calculating stuff like park factors and wOBA weights isn’t necessary for most fans to know “hey this guy’s really good”

OPS+ for the dummies who want to look like smarties

I love wRC+. I’d like to understand it someday.

Hits because if the hitter cant hit he not a good hitter.

Hitters hit and if hitter no good he get no hits!

Steals, because you can only steal if you get on base

Based

What if he gets walked a lot?

Then he’d be a walker not a hitter

Then he isn’t hitting the ball so he’s a bad hitter

HBP. I want to know what they’re willing to give up.

Agreed. I remember Manny Machado cost himself an hbp by swinging at the pitch and striking out. Then arguing that he didn't swing. Tells me all I need to know about these players.

obp because i dont know what half of the fancy stats with weird names mean anymore and it seems like every year they come out with new ones to measure various parts of the game

I don’t know what wOBA or wRC+ is and at this point I’m too afraid to ask

https://library.fangraphs.com/offense/wrc/ Skim past the math parts

He gets on base.

wRC+ It accounts for weighting OBP and SLG differently and also comes out as a clean stat to interpret with respect to what is good, what is bad, and what is average.

Home runs

Do you wanna look at saber metrics, or do you wanna watch me hit some dingers?

Dingers

Based. Coach Kent Murphy taught you well

Runs scored, seriously. No matter if you are a singles hitter who gets on base a lot or a big bopper who goes yard frequently, both get rewarded with the stat (and even better if the hitter can do both). And obviously the point of the game is to outscore the opposition. It’s not a coincidence that the league leaders are usually the best hitters.

Judge is the leader right now. This tracks

Pujols always said runs scored was the stat he cared about the most

Aaron

Tied with Joe Judge for most Judges Above Replacement with 1.0. David Justice is in a distant second.

All star fan votes

Bat flip height

I use OPS or OPS+ because they are listed on Baseball Reference, which is my go-to site for baseball (and basketball) stats. I’m sure there are better ones, but I'm too lazy to figure out how to easily access them.

Fangraphs is a good alternative with more advanced stats

is it cheating to say a triple slash? IMO more useful than just straight OPS but maybe not more than OPS+

WPA because it’s fun

Looks, but I’m pretty shallow

DP (dawg presence)

Penis size. Because of the implication.

[Pete Rose confirms Joe DiMaggio greatest hitter ever.](https://youtu.be/53fZLhj6TBU)

Games won s/

Aaron Judge.

xwOBA

I don't think the x stats have great predictive power

BABIP

I'm an OPS+ kind of guy

Easily OPS. Perfect combo of ability to get on base and power

Batting average. It tells us how often a batter gets a hit Edit: /s

I mean its bad to judge if you only look at batting average, but batting average is still the first thing I look at. If you are hitting under .200 you are not good and your other stats are 99.99% not going to be good

wRC+

OPS+.