## What is OPS?January 12, 2015

Posted by tomflesher in Baseball.
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Sabermetricians (which is what baseball stat-heads call ourselves to feel important) disregard batting average in favor of on-base percentage for a few reasons. The main one is that it really doesn’t matter to us whether a batter gets to first base through a gutsy drag bunt, an excuse-me grounder, a bloop single, a liner into the outfield, or a walk. In fact, we don’t even care if the batter got there through a judicious lean-in to take one for the team by accepting a hit-by-pitch. Batting average counts some of these trips to first, but not a base on balls or a hit batsman. It’s evident that plate discipline is a skill that results in higher returns for the team, and there’s a colorable argument that ability to be hit by a pitch is a skill. OBP is $\frac{H+BB+HBP}{AB+BB+HBP+SF}$.

We also care a lot about how productive a batter is, and a productive batter is one who can clear the bases or advance without trouble. Sure, a plucky baserunner will swipe second base and score from second, or go first to third on a deep single. In an emergency, a light-hitting pitcher will just bunt him over. However, all of these involve an increased probability of an out, while a guy who can just hit a double, or a speedster who takes that double and turns it into a triple, will save his team a lot of trouble. Obviously, a guy who snags four bases by hitting a home run makes life a lot easier for his teammates. Slugging percentage measures how many bases, on average a player is worth every time he steps up to the plate and doesn’t walk or get hit by a pitch. Slugging percentage is $\frac{(\mathit{1B}) + (2 \times \mathit{2B}) + (3 \times \mathit{3B}) + (4 \times \mathit{HR})}{AB} = \frac{\text{Total Bases}}{AB}$. If a player hits a home run in every at-bat, he’ll have an OBP of 1.000 and a SLG of 4.000.

OPS is just On-Base Percentage plus Slugging Percentage. It doesn’t lend itself to a useful interpretation – OPS isn’t, for example, the average number of bases per hit, or anything useful like that. It does, however, provide a quick and dirty way to compare different sorts of hitters. A runner who moves quickly may have a low OBP but a high SLG due to his ability to leg out an extra base and turn a single into a double or a double into a triple. A slow-moving runner who can only move station to station but who walks reliably will have a low SLG (unless he’s a home-run hitter) but a high OBP. An OPS of 1.000 or more is a difficult measure to meet, but it’s a reliable indicator of quality.

## Is A-Rod’s Performance Different?August 3, 2010

Posted by tomflesher in Baseball, Economics.
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In games between milestone home runs, is Alex Rodriguez’ hitting similar to other times? (This is all a very polite way of asking, “Does A-Rod choke?”) It’s difficult to answer, because there’s so little data about those milestone home runs. A-Rod, though, has some statistically improbable results and it would be interesting to look at it a bit more closely.

Over 2008-2009, Alex played in 262 games and had 1129 plate appearances with 281 hits, 65 home runs, a triple:double ratio of 1:50, an OBP of .397, and a SLG of .553. His OBP has a margin of error of .0146, so we can be 95% confident that over those years his baseline production would be somewhere between .368 and .426 and absent any time or age effect that is the range in which A-Rod should produce for any given period.

Two recent milestone home runs come to mind as examples of Rodriguez’s reputed choking. First, the stretch between home run #499 and #500 was 8 games and 36 plate appearances. (I’m intentionally ignoring extra plate appearances on the days he hit #499 and #500.) During that time, Alex had an OBP of only .306. That’s a difference of .091 over 36 plate appearances and that performance has a standard error of about .078 when compared with his regular performance, implying a t-value of about 1.16. With 35 degrees of freedom, Texas A&M’s t Calculator gives a p-value of about .127, so this difference is marginally within the realm of chance. (The usual cutoff for significance would be .05.)

A-Rod hit his last home run on July 22. Discounting the plate appearances after his last home run, he’s played in 11 games with a paltry .255 OBP and .238 SLG over 47 plate appearances. His .255 OBP has a difference of about .142 and a standard error of about .064. That implies a t-value of about 2.21, with a p-value of about .016. That is, the probability of this difference occurring by chance is less than 2%. That gives us one result as close to significant and one as probably significant.

As a side note, A-Rod’s Choke Index continues to rise. He’s gone 48 plate appearances without a home run, and at a rate of .055 home runs per plate appearance the probability of that occurring by chance is about .066. That leaves his Choke Index at .934.