Recently, an article was published on this platform called OPS and OPS+ Explained: The Advanced Stat That Should Rule Baseball, and suffice it to say, it most certainly caught my attention – and not in a good way.
Despite the fact that – even after reading the aforementioned piece – I still have questions and concerns about whether OPS does or even can do what it claims to, and I most certainly have qualms with the methodology of OPS+, I am not here to counter or even push back against OPS as a stat; rather, I want to address some of the claims and assertions of the article that I found most erroneous and objectionable.
One Stat to Rule Them All?
One of the biggest complaints I have with modern analytics, and it is epitomized in OPS and OPS + Explained, is the idea that the statistics of the past are somehow lesser or antiquated; it’s the modernist view that essentially claims “forget about the wisdom of those who came before, who cares if they had almost a century and a half’s worth of evidence that the old ways worked, we are the advanced, we are the people we’ve been waiting for,” or to put it in Star Wars sequel terms: “Let the past die, kill it if you have to.”
Essentially, the way people look at baseball stats today has turned them into Sauron from Lord of the Rings, attempting to try and boil down a player’s value and worth into a singular powerful source; “one stat to rule them all, one stat to find them, one stat to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.”
One of the most common attempts at this is so-called “stat” (which is nothing more than a subjective approximation) known as WAR (which I thoroughly address here), but even the author of the article to which I am responding implicitly admits to this goal it in his title, “The Advanced Stat That SHOULD RULE Baseball”(emphasis mine), and where he says OPS is the stat that we “should be using to measure a hitter’s true value” and “in essence, OPS rewards patience and power; the two traits that win ballgames. It’s a stat rooted in common sense.” But more on that in a moment.
In reality, no singular stat can or should rule baseball, it is both impossible and unwise, which is why modern baseball has suffered as analytics has become the drug of choice for executives and fans alike; in turn, this addiction has turned baseball debates of the day into a proverbial Tower of Babel, where everyone is speaking their own language to each other, but to no avail. See, baseball and her players were never meant to be judged by one singular stat; instead, players and their statistical performance were always meant to be viewed together as a beautiful tapestry, with each statistic telling a part of the complete story that becomes visible when you just step back and look at the whole.
This is why, with limited exception, modern analytics has become the false spirit of this modern baseball age, and it truly has become its own diet version of a religion. Analytics – while sometimes helpful – has become idolatry, and we need to smash our idols, every last one of them.
But surely this is an overreaction, isn’t it? Hardly. We already know that the modern day manager has had his daily duties largely repossessed by the front office spreadsheet gurus, which includes everything from lineup construction to pre-determining the choices made in a game before the game is ever played – which is bad enough – but additionally, let us consider these two anecdotes (of which I can guarantee there are many more):
During a recent radio interview, Yankee broadcasting legend John Sterling recounted a story that had been reported out of Red Sox Spring Training by Dan Shaughnessy; as the story goes, there was a younger hitter who was taking batting practice, and after leaving the cage, he was approached by Sox legend Jim Rice, who started to give him pointers and advice on hitting. Then a member of the analytics department came up to Rice and asked him to stop giving hitting advice because “we are teaching something different.”
Do you see the issue there? The sheer audacity that this iPad-toting, spreadsheet loving nerd, who has probably never played a game of baseball in his life has to have to think he and his team know more about hitting that Jim “I’m literally a freaking Hall-of-Famer” Rice does, and therefore, we don’t want our players learning from him, is an abomination (and no, that is not hyperbole, these are who MLB teams are hiring). As Sterling points out, Rice was both a high average AND a power hitter! You want to talk about common sense? Common sense would dictate that former players, especially those enshrined in the Hall of Fame, should be the exact people General Managers and team leaders want imparting wisdom to their players, and yet…
Then there was what Hall of Fame Manager and multi-time World Series winner Joe Torre had to say in a recent appearance in the booth during a Yankee game; in speaking to the use of analytics in the game, he pushed back on just how grossly the modern front office (and by extension, the fans) relies on them as a definitive source of knowledge, saying (only slightly paraphrased):
“…analytics can tell me it is a good idea to take David Cone out with two outs and a certain part of the lineup coming up, but what analytics can’t tell me is that David Cone would kill a small farm animal to get that third out.”
BRONX, NY – 1998: David Cone of the New York Yankees pitches during an MLB game at Yankee Stadium during the 1998 season. (Photo by Ron Vesely/MLB Photos via Getty Images)
In other words, baseball is a game not only about metrics and statistical analysis, it’s a game about feel, and we have largely lost the latter in worship of the former.
But “the game has evolved,” says the author and the legion of other internet commentators like him; yeah, it has, but it did so not out of necessity, not because we discovered we’d been doing it wrong all this time, but rather because we were sold a lie. I have my own beliefs as to why this happened, but that’s a whole separate issue.
No, Batting Average does NOT “Fall Short”
1 Aug 1999: Tony Gwynn #19 of the San Diego Padres swings at the ball during the game against the Houston Astros at the Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego, California. The Padres defeated the Astros 10-3. Mandatory Credit: Tom Hauck /Allsport
While it may be the shortest section of the OPS article, the author’s contention that batting average falls short is really one of the most offensive things about modern baseball analysis, as he wrote:
“Batting average ignores walks. It treats a single and a home run the same. It rewards hitters for avoiding strikeouts but ignores whether they did anything meaningful at the plate. OPS doesn’t make that mistake. It values production over appearances. It’s the stat that matches the modern game.”
The problem with claiming that batting average falls short or needs to be devalued (especially compared to other stats like OPS) is that it misses the point entirely! Of course batting average ignores walks; of course it treats homers and singles the same, because batting average was never meant to address those things. Batting average has always been a statistic designed to answer one simple question: “On average, how often do you get a hit?” That’s it!
It’s not trying to answer how often you get on base, that’s what On-Base Percentage (OBP) (a stat that actually values appearances) is for, which is why it includes walks and hit-by-pitch; and batting average was not designed to determine how hard you hit the ball or which hits are technically more valuable, that’s why we have slugging percentage (SLG)! So yes, batting average treats homers, doubles, triples, and singles all equal in the sense that they are all hits, and we want to determine how often a player gets a hit, but it makes no attempt to try and argue a single is as valuable as a home run overall.
To argue batting average fails or that it should be devalued because it only does the one thing it was explicitly designed to do, is like arguing a microwave falls short or should be devalued because despite the fact it was only designed to heat up your food, and it does, it doesn’t also keep it cool and fresh when you accidentally leave it in there overnight; it’s like arguing that the glasses I wear, which – besides serving to make me look devilishly handsome – were designed only to help me see, falls short and has less value because they don’t help me to hear better as well.
ANAHEIM, CA – 1989: Wade Boggs #26 of the Boston Red Sox follows through on his swing during a game against the California Angels in 1989 at Anaheim Stadium in Anaheim, California. (Photo by Scott Halleran/Getty Images)
If you want to know how often a player gets a hit, look at batting average, if you want to know how often they get on base, look at on-base percentage, if you want to look at how often a player is getting more than just singles, looks at slugging percentage (or just the total of extra base hits he has compared to how many hits he has in total); looking at all these together is more than enough to answer your questions, and even if you (rather lazily) want to try and combine multiple stats together, that in no way devalues any of those individual stats.
But there is another problem I have with the author’s take on the supposed failure of batting average and why OPS is King, and it’s where he says that “OPS, and by extension OPS+, is the stat that captures what actually wins games,” and that if we’re serious about “recognizing true offensive excellence,” we should bow down to this almighty stat.
I’m just going to say it; a walk is not as good as a hit, it’s just not. Oh, you’ll take it in a pinch, but it most certainly is one of the two lesser of the three positive outcomes (the third being hit by the pitch). In fact, I laugh when people say it’s the job of the hitter to “get on base;” no, it’s not. It’s the hitter’s job to get a hit, or more acutely, to get on base by getting a hit. What makes me say that? Well, like the classic Ben Shapiro meme says, “it’s in the name ‘Hitter.’” It’s the whole reason they carry that long piece of lumber to the plate with them.
But sarcasm aside, it’s true; baseball has long valued hits over walks because they are more valuable due to the positive chaos factor. With a walk, you just go to first base, but with a hit (anything but a home run) you have the possibility of it leading to an error after it lands, or perhaps you can take advantage of a fielder lackadaisically fielding it, and take an extra base. Or perhaps an inside-the-park home run based on what should have been a single or a double, but it took a weird hop. There is far more that can happen when you get a hit of any kind – which, despite the implication of the author, also requires patience – than a walk, which makes getting the hit far more valuable than just simply taking a base on balls.
Side note, just because you walk (which again, no one is saying is a bad thing), doesn’t inherently mean you are being patient; all too often you are facing a pitcher who is either nowhere near the strike zone or worse, probably struck you out if not for the ump missing a call that was far too close, despite the fact that the pitcher froze you.
It is also silly to say that batting average “rewards hitters for avoiding strikeouts but ignores whether they did anything meaningful at the plate.” I hate to break it to you, dear reader, but getting a hit IS doing something meaningful. But additionally, why shouldn’t we value “not striking out?” By definition, a strikeout is inherently meaningless; it accomplishes nothing; with the obvious exception of the double play, I’d rather almost any other out than a strikeout for that same positive chaos rationale.
While the result of the batter being out is the same, a sacrifice fly is more valuable than a strikeout, a liner that is caught or a fly ball that is tagged up on and/or leads to an error after the play is more valuable than a strikeout and so on and so forth. A batter who hits three line drives that are all snow-coned is better than one who strikes out looking three times, because that batter is more locked in.
But what makes the “rewarding not striking out argument” really ridiculous is that batting average does no such thing; it does not punish or reward you for what kind of out you make, it simply tells you how often, on average, you get a hit – exactly what it was asked and supposed to do.
All that said, batting average absolutely matters in today’s game, whether the analytic nerds want to acknowledge it or not; no amount of inorganic evolution can change that, and not just for the reasons stated above.
As New York Post columnist and MLB insider Jon Heyman pointed out in recent days, “Batting average doesn’t matter anymore? The top 5 teams for batting average are in first place,” and former MLB catcher Jonathan Lucroy agrees:
It’s definitely not rocket science, but it may very well be (to steal a joke from Boy Meets World icon Shawn Hunter) “Rocket Scientology.”
Lucroy would continue in a longer post on X:
“You now have big league coaches that never played baseball…the analytics guys all think they have the magic stat, or magic swing, or even the magic bat (torpedo bat)…These businessman owners all operate on numbers. So, in come the analytic salesman that show them through their equations and stats that if they hire them, they will win more therefore making them more money (Moneyball anyone?)
Once these analytic guys obtain a power seat in the organization, they bring in all their buddies to work and sell their “analytic secret sauce” within the organization as a whole…I get it from a business standpoint, but…there is no magic analytic.”
Clearing the Bases
Now that the crux of the arguments has been addressed, allow me to quickly hit on a few other claims made in the now-notorious article on OPS. For example, I laughed out loud when I read this:
“Let’s face it, baseball is a very analytical sport, and its statistics can be confusing. Thus, my goal is to simplify important statistics so you can understand and enjoy the game a bit better without a mathematics degree.”
No offense to the author, truly, but I’m sorry, I find it fascinating and a little hilarious that OPS and these other “better and more precise” stats are both vitally important and yet need to be broken down to be less confusing; the opposite is, and should be, true. You know what is very precise and doesn’t need a breakdown to be less confusing? Batting average, on-base percentage, etc. Simple question, simple concept, simple equation; just simply look at them together and you’ll do just fine.
Baseball has always been an everyman’s game, and so I have a rule of thumb with baseball statistics: if it can’t be easily calculated by a 10-year-old fan looking at the back of a baseball card, you’re probably doing it wrong (and yes, I know many cards now include OPS, which ironically is connected to my final point coming up).
Secondly, the claim was made that “OPS+ doesn’t just measure production—it immortalizes it. You’ll notice these are names etched into baseball mythology. OPS is how they got there.” For reference, the list of names (which adds negro leaguers, most of whom – rightly or wrongly – haven’t been etched into baseball mythology) includes names such as Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Lou Gehrig, Barry Bonds, Jimmie Foxx, Rogers Hornsby, Mickey Mantle and Aaron Judge, so one might thing he has a point. But to claim that OPS is how they got there? May it never be!
They got there long before OPS – which started gaining a following in 1984 (Orwell was right!) due to the book The Hidden Game of Baseball; and here’s the thing, if a newer stat tells you what all the other older stats already did, it doesn’t cement or “immortalize” it, its just redundant.
Yes, I fully understand the point being made is that these players got on the leader board because of On-base and Slugging. Still, the truth is that they got there for much more than that, and that list is missing some real big names if we’re being honest, plus has some clearly inferior players above better ones as you go down the list (Ken Griffey Jr. is #64 and Juan Soto is #28 for example, whereas Ichiro Suzuki and Tony Gwynn are NOT OPS Kings, but should be thought of as mythic heroes of the sport). My point still stands.
Finally, one of the premises of the article is that “the stat we should be using to measure a hitter’s true value, OPS, is still treated like a bench player waiting for a call-up.”
Okay? Maybe that might be more convincing to me if after reading that sentence, I hadn’t turned on the Yankee game to hear Ryan Rucco mention OPS 3 times within the first two at-bats, and then continue to talk about it for the rest of the game, and then have to hear Michael Kay and crew talk about it every game for the rest of the week. Oh, and then there’s this:
OPS isn’t being treated like a mainstream big boy stat? Yeah, color me skeptical, especially when the opposite is true, and like WAR, it is being overemphasized at the expense of what has always, and will always be more than sufficient.
So yes, the game has evolved, but in this case, that is not a good thing, and the stats should not reflect it.
We have to go back.
