Baseball Math for Dummies (Like Me!)

I don’t know if this will speak to you at all. It honestly might not … but when I was in the fifth grade, I asked for a calculator for my birthday. Yeah. Really. These were the olden days, of course, long before computers and spreadsheets and iPhones and whatever. In those days, the game “Simon” — where you tried to press the colored buttons in the correct order — was the very height of technology.

In fact — this is absolutely true — before the fifth-grade birthday present, I would sometimes use an ABACUS to calculate math problems. I actually got pretty good at the ol’ abacus. I should get another one just to see if I still have the touch.

Anyway, I asked for — and received — a calculator for my ninth birthday.

I asked for it so I could figure out batting averages more quickly.

Wow, I LOVED calculating baseball statistics.

OK, last year Rico Carty was 118 for 383.

So, let’s see, 383 won’t go into 118, I have to add the 0, how many times does 383 go into 1180, hmm, is it 3? Let me multiply 383 by three — whoa, that’s just 1,114, so that means Rico hit better than .300! Awesome! Now, the remainder is …

Eventually, I’d figure out that Rico hit .308. What a season!

What a thrill. It felt like a magic trick.

ERA was a little bit more complicated — had to remember to multiply those earned runs by nine before dividing by innings — but once I figured that one out, it was also a blast. I can still remember the visceral delight I would feel when I realized that the [Earned Runs x 9] was less than double the innings. That meant the ERA was LESS THAN 2! That’s bananas!

I probably calculated and recalculated Bob Gibson’s 1968 ERA a dozen times just to have that feeling repeatedly.

Here’s what I don’t know: Was I just a whacko? Or is this something that resonates with you? Did you ever sit at the kitchen table on a Sunday morning and recalculate your favorite stats just so you could see it for yourself, not unlike taking apart a favorite toy to see how it works? Did you ever pass away boring class time calculating Fred Lynn’s batting average or Dwight Gooden’s ERA?

If I’m alone in this … the rest of this article probably won’t make much sense to you at all.

But if any of this rings a bell, well, here’s what I’m thinking: We need a couple of new stats that are super easy to calculate. I mean, sure, batting average and ERA are still around, but they feel more and more limited all the time. We’ve been over the limitations of batting average again and again through the years. And ERA, while still interesting, gives us such a limited view because Daniel Palencia has a 1.73 ERA and Paul Skenes has a 2.13 ERA and Randy Rodriguez has a 1.51 ERA, and those pitchers have nothing to do with each other.

Obviously, we have all of the advanced stats to look up — and you already know that I spend countless hours poring over the alphabet soup that is bWAR, fWAR, VORP, BABIP, wOBA, WPA, OPS+, FIP and the rest.

But what I miss is something elegant and simple — a stat that you can calculate in a few seconds with just a pencil and a scrap of paper (even faster with a calculator and spreadsheet). So I asked Tango if he could lend us at JoeBlogs a couple of his simplest stats — Tango has SO many to choose from.

I had only two requirements:

And Tango delivered two stats — one for hitters and one for pitchers. I’ve been taking them out for a test drive and, early on, I like them both. They’re really fun to calculate, not like homework at all. For the sake of this article, we’ll call them “Tango Simple Average” and “Tango Simple Pitching WAR” for now. If we like them, we can give them names later.

OK, if you’re still with me — let’s drive right in! Get your pencils and paper ready!