Rich
08-01-04, 12:58 AM
Talk about being ahead of your time:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/01/sports/baseball/01score.html
<b><font color=gray>KEEPING SCORE</font>
<font size=3>Looking Beyond Batting Average</font></b>
By ALAN SCHWARZ
<font size=1>Published: August 1, 2004</font><img src="http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/08/01/sports/rickey.184.jpg" align=right>
<img src="http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/dropcap/b.gif">ranch Rickey, a baseball executive just eight years removed from signing Jackie Robinson, called it "the most constructive thing to come into baseball in my memory."
Fifty years ago this week, a 10-page spread in Life magazine, then the nation's most widely read periodical, introduced America to the science of baseball statistics. Readers opened their Aug. 2, 1954, issue to a sprawling feature titled "Goodby to Some Old Baseball Ideas," with Rickey standing professorially at a faux blackboard, pointing at his heretofore secret equation, which, he wrote, "reveals some new and startling truths about the nature of the game."
...
The first term is what we now call on-base percentage. The second, which Rickey called isolated power, is a modification of slugging percentage. The third measures how often runners score per time they reach base. Batting average is nowhere to be found. So, as baseball traditionalists cringe at today's most popular "new" metric among the stat-inclined - on-base plus slugging percentage (OPS) - its roots stretch back to Branch Rickey.
The second half of the equation evaluated pitching by opponents' batting average, walk percentage and more esoteric devices. But Rickey spent most of his (undoubtedly ghost-written) article trying to wean readers off rating hitters by tried-and-true batting averages and runs batted in.
...
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/01/sports/baseball/01score.html
<b><font color=gray>KEEPING SCORE</font>
<font size=3>Looking Beyond Batting Average</font></b>
By ALAN SCHWARZ
<font size=1>Published: August 1, 2004</font><img src="http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/08/01/sports/rickey.184.jpg" align=right>
<img src="http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/dropcap/b.gif">ranch Rickey, a baseball executive just eight years removed from signing Jackie Robinson, called it "the most constructive thing to come into baseball in my memory."
Fifty years ago this week, a 10-page spread in Life magazine, then the nation's most widely read periodical, introduced America to the science of baseball statistics. Readers opened their Aug. 2, 1954, issue to a sprawling feature titled "Goodby to Some Old Baseball Ideas," with Rickey standing professorially at a faux blackboard, pointing at his heretofore secret equation, which, he wrote, "reveals some new and startling truths about the nature of the game."
...
The first term is what we now call on-base percentage. The second, which Rickey called isolated power, is a modification of slugging percentage. The third measures how often runners score per time they reach base. Batting average is nowhere to be found. So, as baseball traditionalists cringe at today's most popular "new" metric among the stat-inclined - on-base plus slugging percentage (OPS) - its roots stretch back to Branch Rickey.
The second half of the equation evaluated pitching by opponents' batting average, walk percentage and more esoteric devices. But Rickey spent most of his (undoubtedly ghost-written) article trying to wean readers off rating hitters by tried-and-true batting averages and runs batted in.
...