----- Original Message ----- From: "Gautam Mukunda" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Brin-L" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Saturday, October 06, 2001 12:22 PM Subject: RE: Bleacher Bums
> What sabermetricians ended up with was, amazingly enough, invented by Branch > Rickey decades ago, but only he had ever used it. This probably explains a > large part of his success as a GM, in my opinion :-) It's now named OPS, > and it is calculated as On Base Percentage + Slugging Percentage: > (walks + hits + hit by pitch) / (at bats + sac. flies + sac. bunts + hit by > pitch) + ((singles + 2 * doubles + 3 * triples + 4 * home runs) / (at bats)) > > I have a feeling I might have missed something small in those formulae, but > they're at least very close to being right. OK, Gautam, I'm missing something. Lets look at the denominator of the first term of that equation. It is: (at bats + sac. flies + sac. bunts + hit by pitch) Why should the on base percentage go down as the percentage of at bats that are sac. flies, sac. bunts and hit by pitch go up. For example, using your formula, if a person is hit by a pitch on every at bat, then his on base percentage is 50%, not 100%. Further, lets say that two players gets either a walk or a hit 40% of the time. Neither has been hit by a pitch. The first player sac bunts or sac flies 20% of the time, the second player never. By your formula, the first player has an OBP of 33% (40%/120%), while the second and has OBP of 40%. That seems to indicate that its better to strike out than to hit a sac. fly. Did you have a sign error someplace? Dan M.
