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July 18, 2014

Strange But True!

Q. Baseball fans, are you a sabermetrician? Have you got a taste for the alphabet soup of statistics being served up in baseball these days?

A. Historically, the holy trinity of baseball stats has been AVG (batting average), HR (home runs) and RBI (runs batted in), says Steve Mirsky in Scientific American magazine. Now we also have “sabermetrics,” a term from legendary stat man Bill James, combining “metrics” with an acronym for the Society for American Baseball Research. The term includes statistical measures such as OBP, OPS, UZR and WAR to help evaluate player and team performance and front office strategy. “Sadly,” Mirsky jokes, “sabermetrics does not refer to exactly how far down onto his sword a general manager has to fall if his team underperforms.”


 
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