Baseball Advanced Stats Explained (Sort Of): Hitting

I know I use a lot of advanced stats when I talk about players in my videos but but not everybody is totally privy to what every Advanced stat and everything means and I I have a bunch of them that I have no clue what they mean but Advanced stats are a good way to kind of look underneath the surface and see what's really going on and how a player is really performing so we're gonna break down what all or at least most of the Main advanced stats that you'll see on this channel and talked about on different websites or shows or whatever what they really mean we're gonna break this into two parts today we are gonna talk offensive stats and we're gonna break these down as simply as my stupid fan brain can comprehend it so let's get into it this is smarter baseball where we Deep dive into everything going on throughout Major League Baseball if you want to support the channel and be a part of what we're building here headed to 500 subscribers like the video subscribe to the page and turn on Note notifications so that you help the channel grow and you don't miss out on any future content so first let's start with your basic counting statistics and these are ones that Baseball fans are probably going to be most familiar with and you're gonna see just across the board when talking about players this is your stuff like plate appearances and at-bats hits divided up into singles doubles triples homers your RBIs runs caught stealing stolen bases walk strikeouts all of that kind of stuff that you can see on field yep that was a base hit he just got a hit he just stole that base that's a stolen base he just struck out that's a strikeout if you've been a fan for a little bit or you played the game you're probably familiar with most if not all of these so I'm not going to spend too much time on it next though is your slash line that's your average on base percentage and slugging percentage we're gonna get into each of these a little bit in depth just because I know most people are familiar with these but I want to point out both the uses and the reasons why maybe some more advanced stats are gonna be a little bit better for determining how good a player is than this really common statistics that we see use all the time so first let's talk about batting average this is the first number in the slash line it's the first one that most people see it's basically the amount of hits that a batter is gonna get per at bat not plate appearance so the difference is this is not counting how often A Guy Walks intentionally gets walked gets hit by a pitch or reaches on error batting average is basically meant to try to measure a batter's ability to make contact and get himself on base via the base hit the problem with this is that it relies on errors and the problem with errors is that it's not an objective stat meaning it's determined by the scorekeeper if the scorekeeper believes that that was a base hit then it gets counted as a hit but that same thing could be ruled as an error and now it doesn't count towards batting average so in the end it's not really a great way to measure a batterer's ability to make contact and also with this we all know the difference between like a bloop single or a seeing eye grounder that just found a hole and a guy hitting a home run but they both go down the same in batting average so yeah they're both a hit but one was obviously a way better hit ball than the other so now the difference between average and on base percentage is that on base counts any and every reason that you could get on base so it's a little bit better measure of how often at least a batter can not get out which arguably is kind of the point of hitting like yes you want to score runs you want to hit the ball far but if you don't get out the game keeps going you only have 27 outs this number is determined by taking the total amount of times that a batter gets on base doesn't matter whether it's a hit an error or a walk anything and divides it by the total amount of plate appearances so this measures when this guy walks up to the plate this is how often he's gonna get on base again though this has a very similar problem with batting average in that it doesn't take into account that a home run is obviously way better than getting hit by a pitch now the number that was supposed to do this is slugging percentage slugging percentage is determined by the number of total bases that a batter reaches on all of their hits divided by the number of at-bats so it pretty much figures out how far along the base paths the batter gets every time that they get a hit so a single then is worth 1.000 slugging percentage and if you were to hit a home run every single at bat your slugging percentage would be four thousand now this has the same drawback as batting average where you're gonna get some added gain or loss really up to what the scorekeeper determines was a hit or an error this brings us to Ops or onbase plus slugging percentage which is you're on base and you're slugging added together and it was supposed to be the first one number measurement of how good an offensive player was but it doesn't take into consideration stuff like base running and the outs that a batter created for themselves plus it has the same drawbacks then as on base and slugging since it's just the two of them together finally two 800 ops's don't mean the same thing you can have a 400 on base percentage and a 400 slugging or a 300 on base and a 500 slugging and they both have an 800 Ops but those are two wildly different players so now we see both the uses but also the drawbacks of some of these very basic stats that we see all the time so let's get into some little bit more advanced numbers and these first ones are gonna deal with when a batter makes contact and hits the ball so first we're gonna talk about ISO or ISO or isolated power this number is determined by taking your slugging percentage and subtracting your average basically it's trying to measure just a batter's power hour and it tries to do this by saying what would your slugging percentage be if every ball you hit was a single and now what is it based on how you actually did so that number is pretty much how many extra bases does this guy get per base hit versus if they were all normally singles now again this is a decent little measure of a guy's power but when we're talking about something using average and slug new percentage again errors are going to influence this so in the end it's a decent little snapshot stat but not something that I would totally rely on next up is babib b-a-b-i-p or batting average on balls in play and this basically measures when a batter puts the ball into play how often does he get a base hit because of that the problem with this is that for the most part it ends up evening out to about 300 for most guys and most of the league so it's not really a great measure there are some of those guys that they do tend to have higher babips over their career or a pitcher vice versa that has a lower one and that's mainly because of how much can they Square the ball up and how hard are they hitting it speaking of which we have hard hit percentage which measures how often a batter hits a ball at 95 miles per hour or higher again just a measure of a guy's power and how often can he just absolutely smoke one and often we see hard hit percentage paired up with Barrel percentage and for a ball to be considered barreled in terms of its exit Velo and launch angle it's expected to have a minimum of a 500 batting average and 1500 slugging percentage for a ball to be barreled It's gotta be hit at least 98 miles an hour between 26 and 30 degrees of launch angle and for every mile per hour that that increases that window of launch angle gets bigger and bigger until you get up to 116 miles an hour which it can go anywhere from 8 degrees to 50 degrees and it's still considered barreled so this is used to pretty much measure how often a batter gets optimal contact if they hit it really hard at the right angle which is gonna probably result in something good you can consider that bulb barreled now the last couple things I want to cover real quick I've said exit velocity a couple times that's just the speed of which the ball is coming off of the bat when it's hit but there's two other stats that I use pretty frequently that I want to talk about that's home runs per Fly ball which is basically exactly as it sounds per the amount of times that a guy hits a Fly ball how often is that fly ball gonna result in a home run and the other one is home run percentage which is the amount of home runs divided by plate appearances so again how often when a guy walks up to the plate is he gonna hit a home run so now all of these stats are pretty much used to determine how good a player's swing is but there's a different part of hitting that is I would argue probably a little bit more important than the swing and that's your approach which comes down to how often are you going to walk or strike out based on are you chasing are you making contact or whiffing what kind of pitches are you swinging at are you taking what the pitcher is going to give you or are you being more selective and waiting for something that you can do damage on so let's start out with walks and strikeouts first I'm just gonna pair a strike out and walk percentage together they're both determined the same way you take whichever one and divide it by plate appearances so again how often when this guy walks up to the plate is it gonna result in him striking out or walking now you can get a good indicator of a guy's approach based on a couple of these next stats the first one will be Chase percentage pretty much is a guy winging at a ball that's outside of the strike zone so something that he should lay off and just take for a ball pretty much this is going to tell you how overly aggressive a batter is and for just how aggressive and general a batter is a lot of the times you'll see swing percentage which is just the amount of times that you see a guy swing per pitch that he sees and his pitches per plate appearance how many pitches on average is he gonna see every time he walks up to the plate these both kind of determine how patient a hitter is is he swinging a lot early and often seeing not of as many pitches or is he being more selective and swinging at less pitches and getting more pitches per played appearance making the pitcher work more and for when he does swing we have contact percentage and whiff rate which are pretty much the same thing they're just like exact opposite of each other I know that makes no sense so let me explain contact percentage is just how often when a guy swings does he put bat to ball it doesn't have to go into play or anything but does he swing and make contact with the ball vice versa with percentages does he swing and only hits air so this will tell you how good a guy is at just making contact but we probably want to refer more to the hard hit percentage Barrel percentage and then we're gonna talk in a second about launch angles and different types of batted balls and stuff to determine the quality of that contact so let's just get into launch angle then launch angle is the angle to which the ball comes off the bat on average a higher launch angle means more fly balls which is going to be a lower batting average but that's where you get the vast majority of your power from versus a ground ball is going to be a little bit higher batting average but you're not gonna see really any power out of that the only ones you're usually gonna get are those roped ones that go right down a line that you get for a double most of your batting average and probably your doubles and maybe a home or two will be more on your line drives those are the ones that get hit more solidly and then you can divide the field up into three equal segments a ball that gets hit to the same side as the batter is hit into the pull side so that goes towards your pull percentage anything hit back up the middle third of the field is your Center percentage and anything hit to the opposite field of the batter is your Oppo percentage I know we're really getting into the weeds here aren't we just bear with me we're about to get till runs created first I'm gonna talk about plus and minus stats though most of the time with batters you see Plus stats because higher is better for a batter the more you're producing the better it is you see that with stuff like like Ops plus and WRC plus which we're going to get into in a second basically what these stats are meant to do is any of the plus or minus stats they set League average to 100 for a plus stat every one point that that goes above 100 is one percent better than League average whereas vice versa for a minus stat anything one point below is one point better say for like a pitcher and most of these stats try to adjust for different ballpark factors the environment all of these different kinds of stuff to where it really tries to give you the absolute League average if you had your average hitter who hit the ball just like this in this park what would the result normally be versus how did this guy do in that situation okay let's get into runs created and if we need to know anything when it comes to runs created we need to know what linear weights are basically some genius went through and figured out how many runs end up getting scored on average when any particular event happens in baseball everything from a walk a caught stealing grounded into a double play or a home run was given a specific percentage amount whatever of runs that normally result from this happening so to figure out how many runs a batter created you take everything that he did good a hit getting on base getting walked a home run all of that you add all of that together those are all positive numbers and then you take the amount of times that he got out grounded into a double play got caught stealing everything like that negative offensively and you subtract the negative from the positive what ends up resulting is the amount of runs that that batter created when we talk about weighted runs created or WRC and then WRC Plus these are basically just set to how did this guy do versus The League average and then how would they have done versus The League average in all of these different environments with everything adjusted for it all this made up that somebody figured out that I'm too dumb to explain to you I mean really when we talk about this stuff the only one you're really gonna see is WRC plus which like I said is basically it's using this runs created adjusting for ballpark factors all of this stuff sets The League average to 100. every point that somebody was better than 100 or that they were worse they were either that one percentage better or worse than League average at creating runs based on every event that they actually did on the field so every single double triple not what was expected based on how they hit the ball so I'll just cover expecteds super lightning fast pretty much somebody takes all of the numbers of how the ball was hit where the fielders are all of this stuff and figured out how often that play normally gets made and pretty much comes up with a number to say like well based on how this guy actually hit every ball this is what his batting average should have been if everything was exactly average and this leads us finally to war and yes I'm gonna come fight you I'm so over making this video right now it's so long but no war stands for wins above replacement and that is the key word when we talk about war so let's get into that so first replacement a replacement player is basically that 27th 28th guy on the roster that you would call up from AAA because somebody got hurt and somebody went through and figured out how well that average replacement player would perform so that I don't have to but I can't explain what it exactly is for you basically they know how much a replacement player would perform So based on what a guy ends up doing over the course of a season and this is determined differently by different sites baseball reference I think leans a little bit more towards on-field results whereas fangraphs tends to lean a little bit more towards the advanced stuff but either way they assign a value to what the player did and they figure out how many wins that would result in over your replacement player based on what that player contributed or didn't on the field now where some people get mixed up with war is to war is a starter level in the major leagues again that zero is replacement level so your average starting player in the Major League should get to war and that's the same for both sides a five-war season is All-Star level and an eight War season or anything higher than that is MVP type numbers so a lot of those earlier Advanced stats look at a very particular thing and they're used to measure a certain skill of a player right how much he can make contact how patient is he what's his power output but WRC plus Ops plus and especially War which takes into account offense defense base running everything these numbers were meant to try to figure out one solid number to show the exact value of a player but again they all have their certain flaws and none of them are of absolute 100 truth so I think the thing to remember when we talk about Advanced stats is look at everything together and not even everything just from one site if I look at a guy's War I look at both baseball reference and fan graphs and kind of add them together see the discrepancies because again everybody measures stuff a little bit differently even if it's pretty similar so use all of these stats together to get a holistic view of what kind of a player you're looking at the production that he put out maybe this season and how that is generally gonna project over the long term if a guy had a really high slugging percentage but hit a ton of ground balls he probably got kind of Lucky and hit way more just down the lines than he should have so you gotta kind of look at everything together and figure out like was this guy lucky is this a skill that he actually has that he can bring forward and how is this stuff going to play out and is it repeatable so comment down below if this was helpful to you any stat that you had no idea that you learned about and think is pretty cool or any of these stats that you like to use in particular and how you use them comment down below and let me know I hope you enjoyed this it's a long video so if you made it all the way this far congratulations you're gonna crack a beer with me tonight because I'm definitely getting one after taking this long to record this so I would very much appreciate any support for this video or this channel either by liking subscribing turning on notifications we're trying to blow this thing up we're headed to 500 subscribers and that's only the beginning so be a part of the foundation of this channel be able to say that you are here from the very beginning as we blow this thing up together once again I hope you enjoyed we'll have part two of this video coming out tomorrow that will cover pitching and defense didn't really get into base running in this but there's not a whole hell of a lot to get into so I'm not gonna bother with it since this video is already so long so I really hope you enjoyed it and have yourself an awesome day