If you ever took an advanced statistics course in college, the above image should make you shudder, I know it does that to me.
With all the wealth of information out there today, how is it possible to know something about a players fantasy value that every other person in your league doesn't know? It's getting increasingly difficult to gain an edge these days over your fellow league mates. With this post, I'll give a short (or long, depending on which way you look at it) crash course in some advanced statistics that will probably help you in the long run.
What are advanced statistics? You may have heard of BABIP among others, but what about ISO or WAR? What about FIP? Confused yet? If so, don't worry. Over the course of this post you should gain a basic understanding of what these statistics are and how to use them to your advantage.
BABIP - Batting Average on Balls In Play
Lets start with an easy one. What you see is what you get. This is basically a players average of balls hit into the field of play. The simplest way to calculate this is (H-HR)/(AB-HR-SO). Basically you are taking strikeouts and homeruns out of a players average and calculating what percentage of the balls hit into play landed safely.
The simplest way to use BABIP, is to analyze "luck." If you think about it, of every single ball a player hits into the field of play, there should be a single constant percentage that land safely for hits. This population mean is subject to fluctuating standard deviations, and is subject to change itself (if the player changes their swing or approach at the plate) but all in all it should be fairly simple to predict what percentage of balls a guy hits in play will land safe, and what percent will be recorded as outs. This is a useful statistic if you know how to analyze trends. It's really simple, actually. The best and easiest example is Aaron Hill. Take a look at the table below.
| Year | BABIP |
| 2005 | .299 |
| 2006 | .319 |
| 2007 | .324 |
| 2008 | .301 |
| 2009 | .288 |
| 2010 | .202 |
| Career | .294 |
Without knowing anything about BABIP, you should be able to tell something is going wrong in 2010. Now, combine that with the simple fact that I just told you, that BABIP is commonly used to measure "luck." It is obvious to assume that Aaron Hill is experiencing a bit of bad luck in 2010, is it not? Based soley on this statistic, one could argue that Aaron Hill's low batting average this year is largely due to bad luck, and he is bound to rebound.
The problem that most people get when analyzing this statistic is what I refer to as the "Gambler's Falacy." If you assume that Aaron Hill has had bad luck to this point, then who's not to say that everything will average out and at the end of the year, his BABIP will be somewhere around his career average? In order for Hill's 2010 BABIP to finish close to his career BABIP, he would have to hit at a rediculously high BABIP for the rest of the season to make up for the low BABIP he's had to this point. You simply can't expect that, and it's called the "Gambler's Falacy." You can, however, safely guess that he will hit somewhere around his career BABIP for the remainder of the season.
IPO - Isolated Power
The Sabermetrics Library gives a great description of what this is, but I'll quickly sum it up. Isolated power, is a way of calculating a batters potential for hitting for extra bases. The formula is simple, it is ISO = SLG-AVG, basically taking all the singles out of the slugging percentage leaving behind only the extra base hits. Saberlibrary notes that in small sample sizes (of less than 550 at bats) this statistic is basically useless in predicting future ISO, and should not be used as a frame of reference. Here is an example (all credit to Sabermetrics Library) of a few players ISO numbers from 2009.
| Player | 2009 ISO |
| Albert Pujols | .331 |
| Adam Dunn | .257 |
| Ryan Braun | .231 |
| Grady Sizemore | .197 |
| Jimmy Rollins | .173 |
| Derek Jeter | .131 |
| Elvis Andrus | .106 |
| Luis Castillo | .043 |
WAR - Wins Above Replacement
WAR exactly a statistic commonly used in baseball, as it doesn't necessarily tell you their value as a fantasy player, rather it tells you their value to their team. It puts a tangible number to the question "What if this player were injured, how much value does this team lose?" If you had to use one statistic, and only one, to evaluate a players value, WAR is the statistic you want. WAR is about as all-inclusive as statistics get. Of course, it's not the end-all be-all of statistics or it would be more widely used, but it is a powerful tool.
The problem with WAR, is that it doesn't necessarily predict future value. In fact, it doesn't at all. WAR tells you how much value the player has been worth until this point, offensively and defensively, and gives you a number of wins as the value. The higher the WAR the better.
As far as Fantasy Baseball is concerned, this is one advanced stat that probably won't help you very much. I can, however, think of a situation where it might. If your WAR is negative, that means that your team is better off using a minor leaguer or guy off the bench in rather than you. So if your Adam Lind, and your WAR is a league low -1.0 (which is actually is this season), you might lose some playing time, and your fantasy owners might consider dropping you.
FIP - Fielding Independent Pitching
Again, I don't feel I can explain this any better than Sabermetrics Library, as their description is spot on.
Basically, research has proven that their isn't a constant average of balls hit in play that are recorded for outs. It varies from year to year and changes constantly. FIP factors the things the pitcher can control, namely walks, strikeouts and homeruns, and puts it into a fancy equation and scales down so it's similar to ERA. The equation is below.
Again, the constant (generally around 3.2 and is calcuated by subtracting League-average-FIP from League-average-ERA) is to scale it down to an ERA-type scale, mostly for ease of use. The most imporant use of FIP is it's predictive power. Research by Tom Tango has shown that FIP is the best known predictor for ERA the following season. That's a pretty powerful tool, if you know how to use it.
There is your short crash course in advanced Fantasy statistics. Any further questions should be emailed to sillyfantasybaseballgame.blog@gmail.com and I can post on them later.
