How about adding the five Monuments of Cycling to your question?
WvA just ended any hopes of seeing a sweep of the Monuments this year by sprinting past Pogacar at the line.
Eddy Merckx has the most Monument wins in his career - 19. Only three have won all five Monuments in their career. Merckx & Pogacar are the only two riders to win three in a season.
On the original question, I say tennis is more difficult.
Winning 7 tennis slams is far easier than winning 7 golf majors. Tiger Woods was the last golfer to win his 7th major (in 2002); and since then we've seen 20+ wins from Djokovic, Federer, Nadal, and 7 from Alcaraz. As for 20+ majors...well, I won't say impossible, just that it's never happened.
But winning just one golf major is far easier than winning one tennis grand slam. In the last 10 years there have been fifteen one-off winners of golf majors, compared with only two tennis (Thiem and Medvedev).
So if a golfer ranked about 50 has the week of his life, then he could win. But if the corresponding tennis player does, he won't.
On the tennis vs. golf debate, it depends a little on what you mean by "hard"—because there are a bunch of things that just aren't fully under a player's control.
Put another way, what's harder: winning a golf major (if you're a top 25 professional golfer) or winning the lottery? It's winning the lottery, even though that takes no actual skill.
I'm not a particularly close follower of either sport, but it seems to me that golf—partially by virtue of playing the course rather than another player one-on-one—offers more opportunities for things breaking your way.
Maybe you're J.J. Spaun, and you play the best golf of your life in the first round of the U.S. Open, and Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy are off their game, and no one else has a particularly inspired performance, and it's raining heavily on the last day, and finishing one under par is enough to win. Golf can be a little messy sometimes, and messy opens the door.
Tennis doesn't seem to give as many opportunities for something like that happening. What's the likelihood that Sinner and Alcaraz both, for whatever reason, just aren't at their best, or something out of everyone's control gives you an advantage? (And if you're merely a top 25 player, then add Zverev, Djokovic, and Auger-Aliassime to that list of people you need to be off their game.) I'd think the odds are pretty slim.
EDIT: I didn't see Andy's comment before posting this. I see now he made a similar case!
Batting average is only irrelevant if you believe baseball stats should be solely used to determine player value. That is one way to use stats, the other is to describe what has happened with numbers. Batting average is like pitcher wins or runs scored or home run totals, they give you a picture of what kind of player a person was and what happened in their games. That has tremendous value to a fan.
This is a really good point. When Henry Chadwick created batting average, I imagine the idea was to inform fans about what happened, not so that teams could explore complex questions of player value.
I haven't seen a cricket match in over a decade. But my understanding is that the stats for individual batsmen, while possible to be made complicated, can be simplified into runs (basically the same as a "hit" in baseball) per wicket (what we'd call "outs"). That is really close to what Chadwick, coming from a cricket background, created for batting average.
Four decades ago, Bill James noted that baseball stats allow us to create a mental image without ever having seen the player. If I told you that one player had a slash line of 300/365/475 and another had one of 265/365/475 without anything more, can you tell me which is more muscular? Faster? Younger? A fan can play these mental games with pretty much all stats from stolen bases to pitcher Ks or outfield assists. And while it doesn't go to on field value, it certainly goes to my entertainment value.
It is clearly tougher to win a grand slam in golf than tennis. In golf, you are playing against the entire field, and yes, not all of the field has a chance to win but the competition at the top is much more difficult to get the win. In tennis, with 128 players, the winner must beat seven opponents to win. How many top players does the champion have to beat? Three, maybe four? Also, the winner doesn't have to beat every top player, just the ones who get through the draw.
But in golf, you only need to beat one player: the one who would finish first without you. If you beat that one person, you win the whole tournament.
[Ultimately, in both sports all the top players in the world get together 4 times per year for a major tournament, and each major has a single winner. The difference in format obscures the more important fact that this basic set-up is the same. I do think there are differences between the sports based on the contribution of randomness to the final result, but these are not the difference you're suggesting.]
The tennis vs golf majors is sort of a strange argument here. You’re saying that it’s harder to win a major in tennis, but then point out the top rated golfers have maybe a 25% chance of winning one. It would seem that golf majors are harder for everyone to win, while tennis majors are harder for all but the top 2 or 3 players. The difference, too, is in tennis you only need to beat 7 players, while in golf, you have to beat an entire field, all the while not being able to play defense against any of them.
It seems that the ABS challenge numbers are settling at around 50%. That means that if there's a dispute between an umpire and a player, they're about equally good at judging.
But catchers have a small edge, possibly because they have an idea of whether they framed the pitch.
One number we haven't seen: how many wrong calls go unchallenged (before a team runs out of challenges).
You can get to that information on unchallenged incorrect calls, but either (a) I can't find an easy way or (b) it takes some effort. The good folks at https://umpscorecards.com/ have the total number of pitches an ump calls and the total that are "wrong" by clicking through to each individual ump. Then you need to back out the challenges which can be found where JoeP is linking.
I'm sure someone is making the information simple and available but heck if I know where to find that version!
I think Tom Tango is a little nuts. He proves mathematically that his two .510 slugging percentage players are not equal, that the one with the lower BA is actually more valuable, and yet he would remove BA as a measure? Then those players would SEEM the same even though they're not.
Just because most people get it wrong, mathematically, doesn't mean BA is not imparting valuable information to people like himself.
Me, I'd rather have than the .300 hitter anyway for the reasons that Joe states—scoring a guy from second, seeing if the guy on first can get to third. PUT THE BALL IN PLAY. MAKE PEOPLE RUN. There's a word for this kind of thing and it's a word Joe often uses: FUN.
I pretty much agree with everything Joe wrote, but the framing on the golf vs. tennis is a bit different from how I would put it.
Let's take an extreme example: what is harder to win, the NBA MVP or the Powerball lottery? My chances of winning either are incredibly low, but the lottery at least gives me a 1 in a billion chance; the NBA MVP isn't even that!
But for the top NBA players (SGA, Jokic, Wemby, etc.), the NBA MVP is way "easier". All they have to do is have everything click for a year or have some of the other guys get injured, and they're golden. Yet for the lottery, everyone in the world has the same low odds, so even if there was some sort of lottery "skill", you could say it's much harder. After all, no matter who you are or what you do, you will never have even a 1% chance of winning the lottery, never mind 50%.
Of course, no one would call the lottery "harder" than winning the NBA MVP. There's just more luck involved. The same thing is true in golf vs. tennis. They're both very (equally?) competitive sports. They both have the same number of majors per year. They both have players who are the best in the world and players who aren't quite as good but are trying to win anyway. The only difference is that for whatever reason, who wins is far more random in golf than in tennis (although both take tremendous skill). To the extent that we count skill but not luck as "difficulty", tennis is significantly harder.
Another thought experiment: suppose tennis switched to the "1-point-slam" format, where each match consists of a single point. Obviously, Sinner and Alcaraz are the best at winning points and winning big points. So they're still be the "favorites" at any tournament they enter, although since one point is such a small number, their chances are winning the tournament have gone down from ~40% to ~1%. Would you say that this tournament is now "harder" for these guys to win? I wouldn't. The necessary skill level to win has gone dramatically down. For the top guys, it hasn't gotten "harder" to win, just less likely that their superior skill will win out against the vagaries of luck.
I think there’s just a lot more randomness in golf. Not all players play in the same exact weather as far as wind and rain, the course changes over the course of a round, bounces in the fairway or where you end up in the rough can be random, the same for the bounces or rolls on the greens. Obviously, keeping the ball in the fairways and on the greens reduces a lot of that, but I don’t think even the best pros can be so precise as to avoid that randomness
Slugging is based on total bases right? So don’t walks count within slugging? I think it is a very interesting question to ask whether each extra total base in the form of the difference in total bases between extra-base hits and singles are more valuable than each extra walk meaning extra avoided outs.
Plus, aren’t there other factors that we are not considering? Like a sac bunt or a sac fly? And a question – on a fielders choice, does the batter who reaches base get an increase in on base percentage even though an out was recorded on the play?
So if you walk, and then you steal second third and home that is zero total bases? So are hits the only thing to count in total bases? Or do things like fielders choices, catchers interference, errors etc. count for anything
Correct. "Total Bases" is 1B+2*2B+3*3B+4*HR. That is how slugging percentage is calculated. The things you mention (walks, steals, fielder's choice, interference, errors) as well as those you didn't (dropped third strike, hit by pitch, etc.) do not count toward SLG, and never have.
The hatred of batting average by Tom Tango (and a lot of the saber 1.0 hardliners) is based around the obsession of removing all context out of baseball analysis and focusing on performance instead of results. For example, let's compare Joey Votto and Tony Gwynn, two guys famous for being incredible at a specific offensive thing: walks/batting eye for Votto and contact/hitting it where they ain't for Gwynn.
For their careers, Gwynn hit .338/.388/.459 and Votto hit .294/.409/.511. Obviously, Votto's power demonstrates that he was probably a slightly better overall offensive player. HOWEVER, if the winning run is on third and first base is open, who would you rather at the plate: Votto or Gwynn? In that instance, a single is the desired outcome, because while a walk will keep things going, it will also put the game in the hands of an undoubtedly lesser hitter.
Obviously, batting average is far from perfect, but so are all stats, which is why we look at dozens of them when trying to evaluate players for things like the Hall of Fame and seasonal awards. Acting like it tells you nothing about a player's performance, though, is every bit as stupid as saying Jack Morris pitched to the score.
So... in exactly one possible base-out situation of the 24, Tony Gwynn is preferable to Joey Votto? YES. That is true. With no one on and no outs, Votto is better. With one out an a runner on first, Votto is better. With two out and nobody on, Votto is MUCH better. Bases loaded, down by one, two outs in a tie game... you take Votto, because it doesn't matter HOW you get on base, just THAT you do. With one out and a runner on second... maybe call it even. No one here has argued that, in all circumstances, 100% of the time, you'd pick Joey Votto over Tony Gwynn if there were one plate appearance for the fate of humanity. There are situations in which Gwynn profiles better, sure. But this argument is as old as the "saber 1.0 hardliners" you mention as I know I encountered it to describe why Derek Jeter was better than A-Rod at least 5 times on the internet like 15 years ago. And always the argument was about the situation you describe - two outs and a runner on third. Of course, ONE out and a runner on third, you're taking the guy more likely to loft a ball to the outfield.
The point is, if we had a draft of hitters, there's really no reason to take Gwynn over Votto as a hitter based purely on their (unadjusted for era/ballpark etc.) slash lines.
I think we're talking about two different things and you're also proving my point exactly: I agree that Votto is a better offensive player than Gwynn was in the abstract, but my broader point is at some point, we have to acknowledge that results matter. Unfortunately, so much baseball analysis, especially when done by the Tom Tango types, is so myopic in the idea that "all results are random" and it's what "should" happen that really matters.
In my opinion, that's not a relevant way to reflect on performance.
Edit: If I could rephrase a little, there are some situations where a single is more valuable than a walk; there are zero situations where a walk is better than a single. At best, they're of equal value. By looking at slugging and OBP and then comparing the difference between two players, you can figure out which player would be better in what difference. Or, you could look at batting average and get that same rough approximation. Sometimes, the convenience and shorthand has value; just like looking at WAR can be a good starting point but shouldn't be the only point.
It's possible you're not disagreeing with him. I would imagine that you're right: you'd rather have Gwynn up with the winning run on third. But you'd rather have Votto up if you're down by one with the bases empty. And, importantly, you don't get to choose who goes up in a given situation, so to find the more valuable hitter, one then averages over all the different game situations, how likely each one is, how important each one is, and computes how well a given hitter will perform in that situation given their tendency for singles, doubles, etc.. That's what WAR and other stats like it tend to give you.
And to be clear, Tango has not said that OBP and slugging are the only relevant data about a hitter. He prefers a weighting system that is based on exactly how valuable each of the different outcomes tend to be. It's just that knowing OBP and slugging give you a somewhat decent approximation of that system, and adding batting average to the mix doesn't actually get you anywhere closer. This is (and should be) a surprising conclusion. It's as Joe said: if you already know OBP/SLG, then higher AVG turns both walks and extra base hits into singles, and it turns out that this helps and hurts you in roughly equal measure.
However, I take your post to be saying that Gwynn and Votto truly are very different hitters, even if the batting average difference "cancels out" in terms of value. And I completely agree. I also think that some sabermetrics guys do focus too much on the value picture to the exclusion of all else (Fangraphs is excellent on giving the broader picture). As long as we admit that winning games isn't the only reason we watch baseball, it's fair and good to care about something like batting average. Teams shouldn't overpay for high AVG guys thinking they'll help the team win because they won't (any more than their other stats show). But teams should sign those guys anyway because balls in play are exciting and fun!
I fully agree that people can watch baseball however they want; however, I think we should also have the grace to not condescend and talk down to how others watch baseball.
I think there has become far too much of a tendency among the saber 1.0 crowd to essentially stop thinking because it was never about curiosity and always about ego. What started as asking questions and thinking about baseball different has turned into unshakeable dogma and that's ultimately what I'm arguing against.
Like you said, there is no right or wrong to watch, evaluate, and explain baseball performance
We can put concrete numbers on this pretty easily. Imagine two players with 600 PAs.
Player A .315/.365/.510 and
Player B .260/.365/.510
Leaving aside HBP and whether the walks were intentional or unintentional, what you end up with is this:
Player A had 284 Total Bases, and Player B had 263 total bases. That makes it sound like Player A in a walk...
Except that walks aren't counted in TB, right? And player B walked 85 times, to Player A's 44 times. If you add THOSE back into Total Bases, it's 44 MORE "bases" to Player B. Now... those are walks, so they're all to first base, and they're all less valuable, so you discount them to get the players to even - fine. But my temptation would be to believe that those 44 based walked were worth more than the 21 bases "advanced." You'd have to argue than 1 TB = 2*BB in order for it to go the other way, and I don't think the math is that forgiving. So my inclination is to say that Player B is, if anything, more valuable than Player A, not in spite of, but BECAUSE OF a lower batting average. But I can see the argument that it's close.
I agree with Tango that batting average *by itself* is misleading, but I disagree that it is utterly irrelevant. Where two players have the same OBP and SLG, I would say that the one with the higher AVG is more valuable--not just because a single is worth more than a walk, but because that player created more runs *per out*. My favorite statistic to calculate from the slash line is simple runs created per out, OBP*SLG/(1-AVG), which is 0.272 for Player 1 and 0.252 for Player 2.
I may be going too deeply for my own good with the math. But if the OBP is the same for the two players, isn't by definition, their outs per plate appearance exactly the same?
Outs per plate appearance, yes; total bases per out and thus simple runs created per out, no. The "clock" in baseball is counted down in outs, not plate appearances.
In a simpler level, is it fair to the player with the higher batting average to compare his singles to extra base hits if you don’t also compare his extra singles to outs?
I'm not following you. The Outs are the same. The Total Bases + Walks (which is essentially OBPxSLG reduced) are the same. The Good Things divided by Bad Things are the same. What am I missing?
Or differently: can you show that two teams that have the same OBP & SLG will have different Runs if one of the two has a higher BA?
I suspect that Tango is correct about calculating retroactive player value. As far as projecting towards the future, maybe there is something to the old Bill James' line about old player skills versus young player skills with greater slugging on the aged side and greater contact skills on the younger. But I'll readily admit that as a card-carrying member of the liberal arts wing of the Saber movement who hasn't kept up to date with the number crunchers, I'm not qualified to really have an opinion. (By the way, anyone know why he no longer uses the moniker TangoTiger? As long as we are on his nome de plume, I liked that more than Tom.)
However, at the heart of it as a fan, I'm looking for entertainment. For that, my aesthetic preference weighs BA pretty heavily. If I could waive a magic wand, I'd want a lot more balls in play - with the attendant singles - even at the risk of fewer homers.
Forever War? Was JoePos making a reference to Joe Hadleman's scifi classic? Some things change (my goodness has the mainstream view on gay rights issues shifted in the last 50 years!) while others stay the same.
Tennis? Golf?
How about adding the five Monuments of Cycling to your question?
WvA just ended any hopes of seeing a sweep of the Monuments this year by sprinting past Pogacar at the line.
Eddy Merckx has the most Monument wins in his career - 19. Only three have won all five Monuments in their career. Merckx & Pogacar are the only two riders to win three in a season.
On the original question, I say tennis is more difficult.
Winning 7 tennis slams is far easier than winning 7 golf majors. Tiger Woods was the last golfer to win his 7th major (in 2002); and since then we've seen 20+ wins from Djokovic, Federer, Nadal, and 7 from Alcaraz. As for 20+ majors...well, I won't say impossible, just that it's never happened.
But winning just one golf major is far easier than winning one tennis grand slam. In the last 10 years there have been fifteen one-off winners of golf majors, compared with only two tennis (Thiem and Medvedev).
So if a golfer ranked about 50 has the week of his life, then he could win. But if the corresponding tennis player does, he won't.
On the tennis vs. golf debate, it depends a little on what you mean by "hard"—because there are a bunch of things that just aren't fully under a player's control.
Put another way, what's harder: winning a golf major (if you're a top 25 professional golfer) or winning the lottery? It's winning the lottery, even though that takes no actual skill.
I'm not a particularly close follower of either sport, but it seems to me that golf—partially by virtue of playing the course rather than another player one-on-one—offers more opportunities for things breaking your way.
Maybe you're J.J. Spaun, and you play the best golf of your life in the first round of the U.S. Open, and Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy are off their game, and no one else has a particularly inspired performance, and it's raining heavily on the last day, and finishing one under par is enough to win. Golf can be a little messy sometimes, and messy opens the door.
Tennis doesn't seem to give as many opportunities for something like that happening. What's the likelihood that Sinner and Alcaraz both, for whatever reason, just aren't at their best, or something out of everyone's control gives you an advantage? (And if you're merely a top 25 player, then add Zverev, Djokovic, and Auger-Aliassime to that list of people you need to be off their game.) I'd think the odds are pretty slim.
EDIT: I didn't see Andy's comment before posting this. I see now he made a similar case!
Also possible there is hidden value in walks in driving up pitch count for the opponent.
Batting average is only irrelevant if you believe baseball stats should be solely used to determine player value. That is one way to use stats, the other is to describe what has happened with numbers. Batting average is like pitcher wins or runs scored or home run totals, they give you a picture of what kind of player a person was and what happened in their games. That has tremendous value to a fan.
This is a really good point. When Henry Chadwick created batting average, I imagine the idea was to inform fans about what happened, not so that teams could explore complex questions of player value.
I haven't seen a cricket match in over a decade. But my understanding is that the stats for individual batsmen, while possible to be made complicated, can be simplified into runs (basically the same as a "hit" in baseball) per wicket (what we'd call "outs"). That is really close to what Chadwick, coming from a cricket background, created for batting average.
Four decades ago, Bill James noted that baseball stats allow us to create a mental image without ever having seen the player. If I told you that one player had a slash line of 300/365/475 and another had one of 265/365/475 without anything more, can you tell me which is more muscular? Faster? Younger? A fan can play these mental games with pretty much all stats from stolen bases to pitcher Ks or outfield assists. And while it doesn't go to on field value, it certainly goes to my entertainment value.
Exactly.
When we get paid to analyze players to obtain, use all measures to make that choice.
Since I'm just a fan, listening to games on "radio", I'll go with the descriptive value (entertainment) Dif laid out.
Are there any teams dragging down the challenge percentage? For the batters, is there correlation to pitch taking or OBP?
It is clearly tougher to win a grand slam in golf than tennis. In golf, you are playing against the entire field, and yes, not all of the field has a chance to win but the competition at the top is much more difficult to get the win. In tennis, with 128 players, the winner must beat seven opponents to win. How many top players does the champion have to beat? Three, maybe four? Also, the winner doesn't have to beat every top player, just the ones who get through the draw.
But in golf, you only need to beat one player: the one who would finish first without you. If you beat that one person, you win the whole tournament.
[Ultimately, in both sports all the top players in the world get together 4 times per year for a major tournament, and each major has a single winner. The difference in format obscures the more important fact that this basic set-up is the same. I do think there are differences between the sports based on the contribution of randomness to the final result, but these are not the difference you're suggesting.]
The tennis vs golf majors is sort of a strange argument here. You’re saying that it’s harder to win a major in tennis, but then point out the top rated golfers have maybe a 25% chance of winning one. It would seem that golf majors are harder for everyone to win, while tennis majors are harder for all but the top 2 or 3 players. The difference, too, is in tennis you only need to beat 7 players, while in golf, you have to beat an entire field, all the while not being able to play defense against any of them.
It seems that the ABS challenge numbers are settling at around 50%. That means that if there's a dispute between an umpire and a player, they're about equally good at judging.
But catchers have a small edge, possibly because they have an idea of whether they framed the pitch.
One number we haven't seen: how many wrong calls go unchallenged (before a team runs out of challenges).
You can get to that information on unchallenged incorrect calls, but either (a) I can't find an easy way or (b) it takes some effort. The good folks at https://umpscorecards.com/ have the total number of pitches an ump calls and the total that are "wrong" by clicking through to each individual ump. Then you need to back out the challenges which can be found where JoeP is linking.
I'm sure someone is making the information simple and available but heck if I know where to find that version!
I think Tom Tango is a little nuts. He proves mathematically that his two .510 slugging percentage players are not equal, that the one with the lower BA is actually more valuable, and yet he would remove BA as a measure? Then those players would SEEM the same even though they're not.
Just because most people get it wrong, mathematically, doesn't mean BA is not imparting valuable information to people like himself.
Me, I'd rather have than the .300 hitter anyway for the reasons that Joe states—scoring a guy from second, seeing if the guy on first can get to third. PUT THE BALL IN PLAY. MAKE PEOPLE RUN. There's a word for this kind of thing and it's a word Joe often uses: FUN.
I pretty much agree with everything Joe wrote, but the framing on the golf vs. tennis is a bit different from how I would put it.
Let's take an extreme example: what is harder to win, the NBA MVP or the Powerball lottery? My chances of winning either are incredibly low, but the lottery at least gives me a 1 in a billion chance; the NBA MVP isn't even that!
But for the top NBA players (SGA, Jokic, Wemby, etc.), the NBA MVP is way "easier". All they have to do is have everything click for a year or have some of the other guys get injured, and they're golden. Yet for the lottery, everyone in the world has the same low odds, so even if there was some sort of lottery "skill", you could say it's much harder. After all, no matter who you are or what you do, you will never have even a 1% chance of winning the lottery, never mind 50%.
Of course, no one would call the lottery "harder" than winning the NBA MVP. There's just more luck involved. The same thing is true in golf vs. tennis. They're both very (equally?) competitive sports. They both have the same number of majors per year. They both have players who are the best in the world and players who aren't quite as good but are trying to win anyway. The only difference is that for whatever reason, who wins is far more random in golf than in tennis (although both take tremendous skill). To the extent that we count skill but not luck as "difficulty", tennis is significantly harder.
Another thought experiment: suppose tennis switched to the "1-point-slam" format, where each match consists of a single point. Obviously, Sinner and Alcaraz are the best at winning points and winning big points. So they're still be the "favorites" at any tournament they enter, although since one point is such a small number, their chances are winning the tournament have gone down from ~40% to ~1%. Would you say that this tournament is now "harder" for these guys to win? I wouldn't. The necessary skill level to win has gone dramatically down. For the top guys, it hasn't gotten "harder" to win, just less likely that their superior skill will win out against the vagaries of luck.
I think there’s just a lot more randomness in golf. Not all players play in the same exact weather as far as wind and rain, the course changes over the course of a round, bounces in the fairway or where you end up in the rough can be random, the same for the bounces or rolls on the greens. Obviously, keeping the ball in the fairways and on the greens reduces a lot of that, but I don’t think even the best pros can be so precise as to avoid that randomness
Slugging is based on total bases right? So don’t walks count within slugging? I think it is a very interesting question to ask whether each extra total base in the form of the difference in total bases between extra-base hits and singles are more valuable than each extra walk meaning extra avoided outs.
Plus, aren’t there other factors that we are not considering? Like a sac bunt or a sac fly? And a question – on a fielders choice, does the batter who reaches base get an increase in on base percentage even though an out was recorded on the play?
Total bases do not include walks, so slugging percentage does not include walks.
So if you walk, and then you steal second third and home that is zero total bases? So are hits the only thing to count in total bases? Or do things like fielders choices, catchers interference, errors etc. count for anything
Correct. "Total Bases" is 1B+2*2B+3*3B+4*HR. That is how slugging percentage is calculated. The things you mention (walks, steals, fielder's choice, interference, errors) as well as those you didn't (dropped third strike, hit by pitch, etc.) do not count toward SLG, and never have.
Do any/all of those count towards on base percentage?
Some yes, some no.
YES: walks and hit by pitch
NO: steals, fielder' s choice, catcher's interference, errors
The hatred of batting average by Tom Tango (and a lot of the saber 1.0 hardliners) is based around the obsession of removing all context out of baseball analysis and focusing on performance instead of results. For example, let's compare Joey Votto and Tony Gwynn, two guys famous for being incredible at a specific offensive thing: walks/batting eye for Votto and contact/hitting it where they ain't for Gwynn.
For their careers, Gwynn hit .338/.388/.459 and Votto hit .294/.409/.511. Obviously, Votto's power demonstrates that he was probably a slightly better overall offensive player. HOWEVER, if the winning run is on third and first base is open, who would you rather at the plate: Votto or Gwynn? In that instance, a single is the desired outcome, because while a walk will keep things going, it will also put the game in the hands of an undoubtedly lesser hitter.
Obviously, batting average is far from perfect, but so are all stats, which is why we look at dozens of them when trying to evaluate players for things like the Hall of Fame and seasonal awards. Acting like it tells you nothing about a player's performance, though, is every bit as stupid as saying Jack Morris pitched to the score.
So... in exactly one possible base-out situation of the 24, Tony Gwynn is preferable to Joey Votto? YES. That is true. With no one on and no outs, Votto is better. With one out an a runner on first, Votto is better. With two out and nobody on, Votto is MUCH better. Bases loaded, down by one, two outs in a tie game... you take Votto, because it doesn't matter HOW you get on base, just THAT you do. With one out and a runner on second... maybe call it even. No one here has argued that, in all circumstances, 100% of the time, you'd pick Joey Votto over Tony Gwynn if there were one plate appearance for the fate of humanity. There are situations in which Gwynn profiles better, sure. But this argument is as old as the "saber 1.0 hardliners" you mention as I know I encountered it to describe why Derek Jeter was better than A-Rod at least 5 times on the internet like 15 years ago. And always the argument was about the situation you describe - two outs and a runner on third. Of course, ONE out and a runner on third, you're taking the guy more likely to loft a ball to the outfield.
The point is, if we had a draft of hitters, there's really no reason to take Gwynn over Votto as a hitter based purely on their (unadjusted for era/ballpark etc.) slash lines.
I think we're talking about two different things and you're also proving my point exactly: I agree that Votto is a better offensive player than Gwynn was in the abstract, but my broader point is at some point, we have to acknowledge that results matter. Unfortunately, so much baseball analysis, especially when done by the Tom Tango types, is so myopic in the idea that "all results are random" and it's what "should" happen that really matters.
In my opinion, that's not a relevant way to reflect on performance.
Edit: If I could rephrase a little, there are some situations where a single is more valuable than a walk; there are zero situations where a walk is better than a single. At best, they're of equal value. By looking at slugging and OBP and then comparing the difference between two players, you can figure out which player would be better in what difference. Or, you could look at batting average and get that same rough approximation. Sometimes, the convenience and shorthand has value; just like looking at WAR can be a good starting point but shouldn't be the only point.
It's possible you're not disagreeing with him. I would imagine that you're right: you'd rather have Gwynn up with the winning run on third. But you'd rather have Votto up if you're down by one with the bases empty. And, importantly, you don't get to choose who goes up in a given situation, so to find the more valuable hitter, one then averages over all the different game situations, how likely each one is, how important each one is, and computes how well a given hitter will perform in that situation given their tendency for singles, doubles, etc.. That's what WAR and other stats like it tend to give you.
And to be clear, Tango has not said that OBP and slugging are the only relevant data about a hitter. He prefers a weighting system that is based on exactly how valuable each of the different outcomes tend to be. It's just that knowing OBP and slugging give you a somewhat decent approximation of that system, and adding batting average to the mix doesn't actually get you anywhere closer. This is (and should be) a surprising conclusion. It's as Joe said: if you already know OBP/SLG, then higher AVG turns both walks and extra base hits into singles, and it turns out that this helps and hurts you in roughly equal measure.
However, I take your post to be saying that Gwynn and Votto truly are very different hitters, even if the batting average difference "cancels out" in terms of value. And I completely agree. I also think that some sabermetrics guys do focus too much on the value picture to the exclusion of all else (Fangraphs is excellent on giving the broader picture). As long as we admit that winning games isn't the only reason we watch baseball, it's fair and good to care about something like batting average. Teams shouldn't overpay for high AVG guys thinking they'll help the team win because they won't (any more than their other stats show). But teams should sign those guys anyway because balls in play are exciting and fun!
I fully agree that people can watch baseball however they want; however, I think we should also have the grace to not condescend and talk down to how others watch baseball.
I think there has become far too much of a tendency among the saber 1.0 crowd to essentially stop thinking because it was never about curiosity and always about ego. What started as asking questions and thinking about baseball different has turned into unshakeable dogma and that's ultimately what I'm arguing against.
Like you said, there is no right or wrong to watch, evaluate, and explain baseball performance
We can put concrete numbers on this pretty easily. Imagine two players with 600 PAs.
Player A .315/.365/.510 and
Player B .260/.365/.510
Leaving aside HBP and whether the walks were intentional or unintentional, what you end up with is this:
Player A had 284 Total Bases, and Player B had 263 total bases. That makes it sound like Player A in a walk...
Except that walks aren't counted in TB, right? And player B walked 85 times, to Player A's 44 times. If you add THOSE back into Total Bases, it's 44 MORE "bases" to Player B. Now... those are walks, so they're all to first base, and they're all less valuable, so you discount them to get the players to even - fine. But my temptation would be to believe that those 44 based walked were worth more than the 21 bases "advanced." You'd have to argue than 1 TB = 2*BB in order for it to go the other way, and I don't think the math is that forgiving. So my inclination is to say that Player B is, if anything, more valuable than Player A, not in spite of, but BECAUSE OF a lower batting average. But I can see the argument that it's close.
I agree with Tango that batting average *by itself* is misleading, but I disagree that it is utterly irrelevant. Where two players have the same OBP and SLG, I would say that the one with the higher AVG is more valuable--not just because a single is worth more than a walk, but because that player created more runs *per out*. My favorite statistic to calculate from the slash line is simple runs created per out, OBP*SLG/(1-AVG), which is 0.272 for Player 1 and 0.252 for Player 2.
I may be going too deeply for my own good with the math. But if the OBP is the same for the two players, isn't by definition, their outs per plate appearance exactly the same?
Outs per plate appearance, yes; total bases per out and thus simple runs created per out, no. The "clock" in baseball is counted down in outs, not plate appearances.
In a simpler level, is it fair to the player with the higher batting average to compare his singles to extra base hits if you don’t also compare his extra singles to outs?
I'm not following you. The Outs are the same. The Total Bases + Walks (which is essentially OBPxSLG reduced) are the same. The Good Things divided by Bad Things are the same. What am I missing?
Or differently: can you show that two teams that have the same OBP & SLG will have different Runs if one of the two has a higher BA?
I suspect that Tango is correct about calculating retroactive player value. As far as projecting towards the future, maybe there is something to the old Bill James' line about old player skills versus young player skills with greater slugging on the aged side and greater contact skills on the younger. But I'll readily admit that as a card-carrying member of the liberal arts wing of the Saber movement who hasn't kept up to date with the number crunchers, I'm not qualified to really have an opinion. (By the way, anyone know why he no longer uses the moniker TangoTiger? As long as we are on his nome de plume, I liked that more than Tom.)
However, at the heart of it as a fan, I'm looking for entertainment. For that, my aesthetic preference weighs BA pretty heavily. If I could waive a magic wand, I'd want a lot more balls in play - with the attendant singles - even at the risk of fewer homers.
Forever War? Was JoePos making a reference to Joe Hadleman's scifi classic? Some things change (my goodness has the mainstream view on gay rights issues shifted in the last 50 years!) while others stay the same.