I've recently started to become interested in the sport, but find all the rules and stats a little overwhelming. Is there a way to ease yourself into the sport? Does understanding all those stats contribute to understanding the game?
Find yourself a copy of Wii Sports and play the baseball minigame eight hours a day for a month.
I'm pretty sure I already did that when I was sick from school in eighth grade.
Buy a scorebook and then teach yourself how to keep score watching games on TV. I absolutely love baseball, but lately, because the game has moved beyond stats to analytics, it's becoming hard to watch. Strategy has been replaced by "three true outcomes" ideology and it's ruining the game, imo.
https://www.kansascity.com/sports/mlb/kansas-city-royals/article230089079.html
I'll second this, keeping a scorecard is really helpful for understanding how a game is unfolding.
Just get a 30 rack and knock some balls around with a couple of friends, and then go home drunk and yell at the TV until you fall asleep in the fourth inning
Not really just know the big ones. ERA is earned run average for a pitcher it's a metric of the number of runs the pitcher gives up per number of innings pitched 3.0 or below is good. Batting avg of course .300-.400 is really good means they get a hit 3-4/10 at bats. OBP on base percentage how often they get on base includes hit by pitch and walks and fielding percentage for fielders is a metric of how many errors/completed plays they have you wanna be above .500 for that. But I will say you really don't need to know all that. I would say learn the rules first then try to figure out the stats if you want baseball is great if you're kinda math nerdy but even if you're not there is plenty to enjoy. I played for a number of years and I am a life long fan so let me know if you have any questions.
I used to play (as a kid) and watch baseball in the 90’s, it’s really not too complicated for the most part. There are definitely some rules that don’t get used very often that’ll take a season or two of regular watching to get the hang of, but they’re not critical.
Re the stats, here’s what I think. Baseball was the first sport to be taken over by nerds; the Nate Bronze’s of the world who collected statistics and used them, successfully at times, to predict things about the outcomes of events/games.
The nerds were introducing scientific management to the sport, promising the owners and managers that arcane statistics would help improve win rates, use funds more efficiently to choose which players to sign, etc, which would ultimately lead to more fans, higher engagement, more revenue. This is probably the plot of Moneyball, although I haven’t seen it (stats nerds are definitely the plot of moneyball, I just don’t know how they’re portrayed or what the outcome is).
My understanding is that the nerds were incredibly successful at infiltrating baseball management (at least in an advisory role), and I would not be surprised if their ethos spread itself throughout the spirit of the game—with broadcasters now being able to fill the silence talking about weird stats, rather than whatever kind of small talk they’d do in the 90s (viewing stats as a pillar of scientific management, we know what happens to capitalists who don’t keep up with advances in productive technology; they’re dustbinned).
So I don’t view the stats as critical; there was a time when they were just a thing people kept track of, but most people couldn’t tell you a single one aside from their favorite player’s batting average or RBIs. But depending on how deeply the stats have permeated into the culture of the fans, you may be a bit “left out” if you’re not vaguely familiar with some of the more popular things.
All of that said, I haven’t watched in many years so I don’t really know the current state of things.
Nope, you definitely don't need to know the stats IMO. You'll learn a ton about baseball just by sitting down and watching games, especially if you pay attention to the "battle" between the hitter and the pitcher. Tbh the people I know who are really into the stats like to follow the sport more than actually watching and enjoying games.
The stats seem intimidating at first but they're really not as complex as they might seem. I'll try to give an overview of the most important ones to know.
For hitting: Back in the day, the only hitting stats anyone really paid attention to were batting average, RBIs (runs batted in), and home runs, with a .300 batting average and 100 RBIs considered the cutoffs for what makes a good hitter. When Billy Beane and Moneyball came about, through the use of analytics they were able to shift the focus from these flawed stats to ones that more accurately determine a player's value. For example, batting average is flawed because it treats all hits as the same, whereas a homerun is much more valuable than a single. A .300 hitter who only hits singles is much less valuable than a .250 hitter who can hit doubles, triples, and home runs. RBIs are also very flawed because it is very team dependent. Hitters in better lineups will get more opportunities to drive in runs, and great hitters with poor teammates will be unfairly penalized. Moneyball put a much heavier focus on on base percentage, because hitters who get on base are creating more scoring opportunities and making fewer outs.
If I had to pick one offensive stat to know, it would be OPS. OPS is just a simple addition of a hitter's on base percentage and their slugging percentage (slugging is the average number of bases a hitter gets per at bat, with a .500 slugging percentage typically being the mark of a strong power hitter). A .750 OPS is average, .850 is All-Star territory, and .900 and above are elite hitters. Even if OPS is the only stat you know, you'll more or less know who all the best and worst hitters are.
If you want a stat that's a bit more advanced, wRC+ is the best one. It stands for weighted runs created, and it attempts to account for the current year's offensive environment and adjust for ballpark effects. Some ballparks like Coors are a hitters' paradise, so a .900 OPS there is not as impressive as a .900 OPS in a ballpark that suppresses offense like Oracle. The calculations of wRC+ might be complex, but the way to understand it is not. A 100 wRC+ is the average hitter, while a 110 wRC+ is 10% better than average and a 90 wRC+ is 10% worse than average. When you see someone like Mike Trout or Juan Soto sporting a 200 wRC+, that means they were twice as good as the average hitter that year.
Pitching: Traditionally the most important pitching stats are ERA (the average number of runs a pitcher allows per nine innings) and wins. The analytics here are a bit more complex than with hitting. Virtually no one these days takes pitcher wins seriously anymore, as it's even more team dependent than RBIs, and a pitcher can have a dominant game but take the loss if his offense doesn't support him, or conversely pitch like trash and still get the win because his offense had a great night. ERA is still important, but it's lost significance because it is dependent on many things outside of a pitcher's control, such as the quality of the defense behind the pitcher. This led to the creation of FIP (fielding independent pitching), which is calculated using strikeouts, walks and home runs allowed, and is supposed to reflect what a pitchers' ERA "should have been" if you take the defense out of the equation. FIP is a better predictor of future ERA than ERA itself, but it still has it's own flaws, as pitchers who have the ability to induce weak contact are able to "outperform" their FIPS.
For pitching, I'd stick with ERA for now, but looking at FIP can still be helpful if there's a large divergence between the two numbers, as it most likely indicates unsustainable performance.
Fielding: I'd forget about fielding for now, as even though defensive stats are still improving every year, they're still a bit of a black box and don't tend to be reliable until you have multiple seasons worth of data, and even then there are confounding variables. The only thing I'd note here is that the more valuable defensive positions such as shortstop, catcher, and center field have a much lower acceptable bar for offensive performance. A slick fielding shortstop with an .800 OPS is likely to be just as valuable if not more so than a first baseman with a .900 OPS, because virtually any major leaguer can be taught to play first base, while it's much more difficult to find someone with the right athleticism and instincts to handle shortstop.
So it really only comes down to the handful you mentioned. The rest being more supplementary but not as necessary to know. That makes it a lot easier to follow.
baseball is pretty great in person or on radio. If and when all this gets back to regular America, i'm def spending my summers at orioles games. Mostly i just throw on the games in the background if i'm working or in my car when i can't watch the games, the play-by-play guys are usually pretty good on the radio if you're into that.
the stats that regular fans usually care about are
- Batters: batting average, home runs, runs batted in
- Pitchers: wins, ERA (earned run average), and strikeouts
- Baserunners: steals (although baserunning is kind of dying out with the whole three true outcomes)
Baseball is my favorite sport. You don’t need to know all the stats, and they’ll be easier to understand as you keep watching.
If you have any questions feel free to ask.
