Analysis
Amateur Numbers: Slash Line— the Main Stat of Offensive Baseball.
Wait, what?
Many people think that baseball is a sport that needs less thinking.
“It’s an easy sport, a player threw the ball then the opponent hit a home run off it, etc.”
But it isn’t the case, seriously.
Baseball is a sport about numbers, and I mean, NUMBERS. In my opinion, baseball writers contributed with greater statistical analysis niches than any other sports.
“Is baseball game has to deal with a lot of numbers? Are you kidding me?”
Yeah, it is a game with A LOT of numbers involved, either those numbers are statistical-wise or coincidental-wise.
Numbers play significant parts in shaping baseball into today’s form of the game. From the dimension of the playing field, stadium sizes and many more, but right now I want to explain what made baseball understandable and somehow, global.
No, no, not Home Run and Runs Batted In. It’s too obvious.
Back to the basic.
Introducing;
Slash Line a.k.a. “Triple Slash”.
Three statistics which is often described as the fundamentals of baseball statistics. Batting Average, On-Base Percentage and Slugging Percentage.
So, a question still looms.
How do you explain those?
Background
I. Batting Average.
Batting Average (abbreviated as BA) is the oldest form of statistics that measures the ability of batters to hit the ball safely.
MLB told us in their own website that;
“One of the oldest and most universal tools to measure a hitter’s success at the plate, batting average is determined by dividing a player’s hits by his total at-bats for a number between zero (shown as .000) and one (1.000). In recent years, the league-wide batting average has typically hovered around .250.”
While batting average is a useful tool for measuring a player’s ability at the plate, it isn’t all-encompassing. For instance, batting average doesn’t take into account the number of times a batter reaches base via walks or hit-by-pitches. And it doesn’t take into account hit type (with a double, triple or home run being more valuable than a single).”
Hence, batting average is an absolutely good sight to hitters, hitting coaches, managers, analysts and especially pundits.
Somehow, because batting average leaders, when they hit a ton of home runs (like Albert Pujols in his St. Louis Cardinals year or, recently, Christian Yelich with Brewers) were coveted as the main force of the team.
II. On-Base Percentage.
Ah, the sweetness of sugar, molasses, and honey….
On Base Percentage (abbreviated as OBP) constituted as a tool to measure how a hitter produces in the way everyone did. Walks, Hits, HBPs.
As MLB said;
“OBP refers to how frequently a batter reaches base per plate appearance. Times on base include hits, walks, and hit-by-pitches..”
….pretty clear, eh?
But MLB didn’t include errors, times reached on a fielder’s choice or a dropped third strike to this equation. Separately, sacrifice bunts (and also sacrifice flies) are removed from the equation entirely for a reason.
MLB also said, “…because it is rarely a hitter’s decision to sacrifice himself, but rather a manager’s choice as part of an in-game strategy.”
It is, still, a valuable universal tool to measure how effective a hitter was in the batter’s box.
The creator of this stat was the former Brooklyn Dodgers (now LA Dodgers) GM, Branch Rickey back in the 1940s.
Still confused? Go watch “Moneyball”.
Yes, that film which starred Brad Pitt, pre-MCU Chris Pratt, and Jonah Hill.
Yep, this statistic was the main focus of the film, as 2002 Oakland A’s tried to replace two lucrative players in both Johnny Damon and Jason Giambi with Jason’s lil’ bro, Jeremy, a washed-up 36 years old in David Justice, and knuckleball-catching-turned-first-baseman Scott Hatteberg.
They finished with 102–60 record, 14 games(!) behind 116-win Seattle Mariners, the most win ever achieved after the dead-ball era. A wild card berth.
It paid off, by allowing patient, walk-prone hitters like Justice, Hatteberg, and Je. Giambi (albeit not a full season since he was swapped with John Mabry) to hit in front of free swingers like 2002 AL MVP Miguel Tejada and Eric Chavez.
20-win streak, 103-win season with AL West title ahead of the eventual World Series winner, 99-win Anaheim Angels and defending AL runners-up in 93-win Seattle Mariners did them good, or did they?
Their OBP went into a somewhat pedestrian .333, even when it’s slightly lower than their regular season .339, combined with their inability to swing the bat really well (Justice didn’t walk, Tejada batted .143) made their fall to the Twins in ALDS inevitable.
III. Slugging Percentage.
Ok.. this part is pretty hard, I suppose.
MLB said that.
“Slugging percentage represents the total number of bases a player records per at-bat. Unlike on-base percentage, slugging percentage deals only with hits and does not include walks and hit-by-pitches in its equation.”
Slugging percentage differs, albeit not greatly since it was a form to translate batter effectiveness, from batting average in that all hits are not valued equally. Because, as it implies before, players with high slugging percentage tend to have a crazy numbers of total bases.
But, as the youngest stat, only recorded formally from 1980s , it is far from perfect.
So, to measure how effective a player is as a hitter, we can use OPS, which essentially adding this stat with OBP.
To sum it up, the slugging percentage is, if not always, correlated to a certain amount of ability from a certain player to hit extra-base hits.
Facts
- You can have a lower OBP than BA. Sounds “impossible”, but it could (and did) happened because you haven’t walked yet, but you do have a sac fly/ sac bunt/some other kind of plate appearance that counts as a PA without reaching base, but doesn’t count as an at-bat for BA purposes.
- Baseball’s batting average was derived from the cricket one. Although it sounds peculiar, since the Society of American Baseball Research (SABR) listed English-born Henry Chadwick as the founder of batting average in baseball, so it maybe... did not.
- For 1887, walks were counted as hits. If Barry Bonds’ 2004 stats (.362/.609/.812) counted his walks as hits, he would have 367 hits(!) as he walked a mind-boggling 232 times(!) with 120 intentional walks, a record that unlikely to be broken since no-hitters could walk over 145 times since 2015 (the last person to do it was, after all, Cincinnati Reds’ first baseman Joey Votto).
Calculation
I. Batting Average
II. On-Base Percentage:
III. Slugging Percentage:
Leaders
All-Time.
- Batting average
So far, either MLB.com, Baseball Reference, Baseball Almanac or ESPN all are agreed that Ty Cobb had the highest career batting average with .366.
In the modern era, the highest annual batting average is held by Tony Gwynn from National League with .394 average in strike-shortened 1994 season.
2. On-base percentage
The highest career OBP titleholder is Ted Williams of Boston Red Sox with .482 average. Meanwhile, the highest OBP of a season is still held by Barry Bonds, whom .609 average in 2004 is unlikely to be reached in recent times because of his whopping base on balls number (he had 135 hits compared to 232 walks, which 120 came intentionally).
3. Slugging percentage
The Sultan of Swat himself, Babe Ruth, holds the highest SLG percentage with .6897, the proof of his ability to hit the ball far.
But the single-season slugging percentage leader is, indeed, the MLB career home run leader himself, Barry Bonds, when his 73– home run season combined with .863 percentage is something spectacular.
2019.
2019 shows that despite home run numbers skyrocketed, batting average somehow slightly dipped, walks were also dipped heavily, and the strikeout rate were all-time high.
Chicago White Sox’s shortstop Tim Anderson led the American League with .335 average in 123 games, while Milwaukee Brewers’ outfielder Christian Yelich led the National League with .329 average in 130 games.
Yelich also led the NL with .429 On-Base Percentage in 2019. On the other hand, Mike Trout, which also led the AL, and MLB, with .438 On-Base Percentage.
As for Slugging percentage, the leaders were Yelich, yet again, with .671 SLG % which led the NL and MLB in 2019, then followed by Mike Trout, which led the AL with .645 and Minnesota Twins’ DH Nelson Cruz with .639
“Kowalski, Analysis.”
What do the numbers say?
A good number is often correlated to Sabermetrics (which is the “ultimate” form of empirical analysis of baseball, especially baseball statistics that measure in-game activities such as FIP, BABIP, etc.) but since those statistics are very complicated for those who know less or nothing about baseball, so…
“Elite” itself in this term could be a bias, but generally people understand that a normally-looking .3xx/.4xx/.5xx (e.g. .310/.407/.520) is considered elite, nowadays. To figure out what is an “elite” triple slash, we could see it here:
To make it even more easier, this is an article from Fangraphs to show you how to determine good triple slash numbers, and not.
For example, Barry Bonds had a barmy 2004 season, with .362/.609/.812 to his name. This wasn’t the case of normal hitter, by the way.
Oh yeah, 2004. The year when Boston’s 86-year old curse was removed.
’Twas a long time, eh? Years before Statcast, exit velocity, RPMs, and so forth.
Normally, hitters nowadays would have slashed around .248/.318/.409 (2018 league average) to .252/.323/.435 (2019 league average) which absolutely go in line with skyrocketing home run rate since 2017 (1.39 HR/Game in 2019) and strikeout rate (8.81 SO/Game in 2019)
Both of HR rate and SO rate last season were the highest in all-time rate. So, as batting average lowers slightly, slugging percentage did climb a little bit (remember that dingers are hit like playing rubber baseball?)
I could conclude why hitters in the 1990s steroid eras were hitting bombs, but with the advancement of data-based knowledge, which is essential in baseball, more hitters launching bombs, bombs, and struck out more.
But a slash line, after all, defines how proficient a hitter was, because from when one stat bad, it didn’t define that hitter as a so-called bad hitter. It was just his ability to hit a certain thing at a certain time.
If you’re still confused or interested (or both!) you could read it here.
That’s all that I can give to you, folks.
So, let the kids play.
Salut.
