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Sabermetrics is the study of baseball using advanced statistics to analyze the game.
Today, Bill James and Pete Palmer are among baseball’s foremost sabermetricians (although James would like to shed that label in favor of simply “author”). James, in fact, is the one who created the word “sabermetrics” in honor of the sport’s first and finest research organization, the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR).
Here’s an example of how sabermetrics works. We’ll examine Nolan Ryan’s statistics to really judge his greatness. The biggest knock against Ryan always was that he was never much of a winner. He won 20 twice and 19 twice, but most of his career was filled with double-digit loss totals. He finished his career with 324 wins but also 292 losses, which rank 12th and 3rd all time, respectively, for a .526 winning percentage — not an impressive total.
On the other hand, his teams weren’t that great, so here’s the question: How much was Ryan’s won-loss total hurt by the teams he played with?
To answer that question, we’ll look at a sabermetric stat called Wins Above Team. This is how it works. Nolan Ryan’s teams, throughout his career, won 2,115 games and lost 2,048. We subtract Ryan’s won-loss totals from that and get 1,781 wins and 1,757 losses, for a winning percentage of .503, which isn’t as bad as people might have thought. If we then take that winning percentage and multiply it by Ryan’s total of wins and losses — his decisions — we’ll arrive at the number of wins an average pitcher was expected to have gotten if he had pitched for those teams when Ryan did. That number is 309.6. Ryan won 324 games, which means he won 14.4 games more than the average pitcher would have won.
Now let’s compare Ryan’s numbers with a few others. The table below lists the career won/loss stats of Ryan and four other current Hall of Famers: Ferguson Jenkins, Ted Lyons, Walter Johnson, and Lefty Grove. Included in the table is the won/loss record of the player’s teams after subtracting his personal wins and losses. Three of the pitchers were chosen because they, like Ryan, weren’t blessed with great teams; Grove did have good teams behind him, so I threw him in as a control. Here are the totals for the other pitchers:
| Player | W | L | W% | Active | Teams | Team W% | WAT |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ryan | 324 | 292 | .526 | 1966-93 | Mets, Angels, Astros, Rangers | .503 | +14.4 |
| Jenkins | 284 | 226 | .557 | 1965-83 | Phillies, Cubs, Rangers, Red Sox | .500 | +30.0 |
| Lyons | 260 | 230 | .531 | 1923-46 | White Sox | .442 | +43.3 |
| Grove | 300 | 141 | .680 | 1925-41 | Athletics, Red Sox | .561 | +52.6 |
| Johnson | 417 | 279 | .599 | 1907-27 | Senators | .460 | +96.0 |
What do the numbers show? Well, for one thing, they show that true greats like Grove and Johnson are able to rise significantly above their teams, whereas Ryan was only slightly better than his teams. Grove and Johnson were arguably the greatest pitchers of all time, so maybe it’s not fair to compare Ryan to them. So we’ll focus on the other two.
If you ask most fans who was better between Jenkins, Lyons, and Ryan, the nearly unanimous vote will be Ryan. But check the stats: Jenkins and Lyons had significantly more wins above their teams over the course of their careers despite shorter careers than Ryan. We can run the numbers for other pitchers, too: Steve Carlton (44.9), Phil Niekro (42.3), Robin Roberts (36.5), and Gaylord Perry (23.1). Sandy Koufax was 27 wins above the Dodgers — nearly twice as many as Ryan even though Koufax’s career was half as long and his teams were much better.
Wins Above Team is basically a way to objectively judge a pitcher’s winning percentage, and I know that winning percentage is not the only criteria to evaluate pitchers. But I also know that the object of baseball isn’t to strike out the most batters or allow the fewest hits — which is what Ryan was so good at. Rather, the object is to win games, making winning percentage a very important statistic — one in which Ryan, despite his other fantastic numbers, falls significantly short.
None of this is to imply that Ryan wasn’t a great pitcher, because we all know he was. To be so effective for so long, 26 years, in the major leagues is worthy of our esteem and admiration. In January 1999, he was justly elected to the Hall of Fame with more than 98% of the voters on his side.
But when we’re evaluating the greats, we have to look beyond reputation and glossy stats. That’s what sabermetrics are all about.
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