Judge that Scrub: Hitters

Derek Milhous Zumsteg

If you've been following spring training in your local paper, you're probably tired of the cotton-candy coverage you're getting. All of the players your team just acquired are scrappy, can-do guys who bring good defense, a bat off the bench, veteran leadership, and clubhouse spark. And you might be getting wary. After all, since those sports reporters depend on the goodwill of the team for their jobs, they probably aren't going to tell you that, say, Joe Carter's an out machine. So with the limited tools available to every newspaper reader in the country, here's how you can gauge a player's relative ability.

First, ignore batting average entirely. Batting average is useful in the sense that it offers a vague idea of how player hits. But take two shortstops: Player A has a batting average of .317, struck out only 22 times in an entire season, walked 11 times, and hit a couple of dingers. Player B has a batting average of .279, struck out 58 times, walked sixty-four times, and hit eight homers. Which one would you rather have on your team?

Here's how you find out. First, look at their On-Base Percentage (OBP). The OBP of Player A might be .343, versus .373 for Player B. OBP is figured by dividing the number of times a player gets on base by the number of times he steps to the plate. It's a great way to judge how good a player is at getting on base, and since this is the most important thing a player can do (except change into street clothes and wait for hecklers like me), it's important to pay attention to it. You have to have players on the bases to score runs, and OBP easily tells you how often your players do this. If your team can't score runs, look to the low-OBP players first (and if you have Joe Carter and Mike Bordick on your team, look no further).

OBP is also a good measure of a player's control of the strike zone. A great hitter like Frank Thomas or Edgar Martinez will get on base just under half the time. A player like Rey Ordonez, who can't figure out why he can't take his glove to the plate, will be lucky to get on base half as often ("it's a bloop hit along the line...and the entire dugout is pointing to first and screaming, 'Run, Rey, Run!'"). Without a decent OBP, no player is worth anything at the plate, regardless of their other abilities. A speedy, scrappy player can have all the base-stealing ability in the world, but if he doesn't get on base, he's of no use to anyone. He's a pinch runner, and you can't waste roster spots on pinch runners.

So in our example, Player A, who has a higher batting average, doesn't get on base as often as Player B, and while .343 isn't a whole lot less than .373, it'll be noticeable.

Now you probably already notice that your team has players who obviously suck at working their way onto base where they can do something exciting like score a run. Now look to Slugging Percentage, usually abbreviated as SLG. This isn't quite as good as OBP, because it's figured as total bases divided by at-bats, but walks don't count. However, it's a great measure of how hard a player hits the ball -- whether they're scrappy singles hitters or if they rope doubles and poke balls over the fences. In our example, Player A, with the BA of .317 and the OBP of .343, also has a SLG of .380. You'll immediately notice that he doesn't get many more bases than he does hits. He's rarely on second base, probably never on third.

But Player B has a SLG of .419. Again, he's about 30 points better than Player A. Looking closer, we find he hits a lot of doubles (23), a couple of triples (5) in addition to 9 home runs. That's significant - he's in scoring position more often. A great hitter like Frank Thomas will have a Slugging Percentage of about .600, while a scrappy, no-bat player like (let's pick on him again) Rey Ordonez will struggle to get a .250. Obviously, SLG is a great measure of a player's ability to drive the ball and get extra bases (or, in Thomas' case, all the bases), and drive in runners on base.

You've probably already decided that Felix Fermin is an inferior player to Barry Larkin, and you'd be right. But here are some other things to look at: compare walk totals both to other players (to see if they're walking more often than their counterparts), and also to their own strikeout total (to see if they've got that strike zone command). Try not to pay too much attention to home runs, either: Manny Ramirez hit sixteen fewer home runs than Juan Gonzalez last year, but got on base far more often (four out of ten times to just over three of ten), which meant he scored more often. Because he has a better eye, Manny's worth far more than that overrated bicep.

Of course, this doesn't take into account a player's defense. Honestly, I don't much care. Compare Mike Bordick (OBP: .283,SLG: .318) with Alex Rodriguez (OBP: .350, SLG .496). To justify having Mike Bordick's whiffle bat in your lineup over Alex, Bordick would have to come equipped with elastic arms, teleport around the field to make plays, and serve free Labatt's to the fans between innings, and I'd still bench him.

Derek Zumsteg is the staff cynic here at strikethree.com, and enjoys reading about the life of Voltaire when he's not writing cgi scripts to post random Shakespearean taunts regarding Alvaro Espinoza. Feel free to call him a fobbing earth-vexing skainsmate at dmz@strikethree.com.