Quote:
Originally Posted by the 'stache
Who is more valuable? A player who hits .314 with a .700 OPS, or a hitter who hits .297 with a .950 OPS?
Power matters. There is more to hitting a baseball than batting average. Ichiro has no power to speak of, and his ability to get on base, beyond hitting singles, is sorely lacking. That's why he's only 5% above average. OPS + factors in OBP and SLG, and adjusts for ballpark factors.
Ichiro hit .314 (.3136).
Hank Greenberg, right below him on the all-time average leader board, hit .314 (.3135).
Ichiro had 3,878 total bases in 9,573 at bats. A .405 SLG.
Hank Greenberg had 3,142 total bases in 5,193 at bats. A .605 SLG.
Greenberg had the same average, lifetime, but brought incredible power to his game. And a home run always trumps a single.
That's not all. Ichiro walked 620 times in 10,339 plate appearances. He has a .357 OBP career.
Greenberg walked 852 times, or 232 times more in 4,241 fewer plate appearances (6,098 PAs total). His career OBP was .412.
Ichiro's career .762 OPS is only 5% above league average for his career.
Meanwhile, Greenberg's 1.017 OPS is 58% better than league average for his career.
Two .314 career hitters. Ichrio with a career 60.0 WAR (58.1 fWAR) in 2,455 games played. Greenberg with a career 57.5 WAR (61.1 fWAR) in 1,394 games played. Those WAR metrics take everything into consideration-hitting for power and average, OBP, speed, fielding.
Who would you rather have?
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Power matters, but ops is extremely overrated. If I had two guys with equal BA, I would take the guy with the higher SLG. I would rather a guy who hits for a high average than a guy who walks a lot.
Walks are the most overrated stat in baseball. The goal of the game is to score runs. A walk only scores a run when the bases are loaded, which is rare. A hit scores the runner from 3rd almost every time, from 2nd most of the time and from 1st a lot of the time on extra base hits.
This even totally ignores the strategy of walking a guy with 1b open and 1 out to set up the double play or pitching around a hitter with 2 outs to get out a weaker hitter. I would rather my star hit a pitch out of the strike zone than allowing himself to be pitched around. Give me a guy with 3000 hits over a guy with a bunch meaningless walks.
WAR is pretty much worthless. It over values walks. The values for fielding are random. Certain positions are over valued and others are under valued. Baseball reference even completely changed how they calculated it a few years ago. Fangraphics has their own system which varies from BR.