Same wOBA, Different Story
Manny Machado, Juan Soto, and Eugenio Suarez are three all-star caliber baseball players. The trio consistently set baseball discourse ablaze. But there’s one question in baseball circles that has been debated for years: “Who is better?”
Difference between .300 and .275 hitter is one hit every two weeks. If you see both 15 games a year, there’s a 40% chance that the .275 hitter will have more hits than the .300 hitter. - Moneyball, Michael Lewis
Sure we can all watch them play, but baseball is a game of numbers. We cannot rely on our eyes, heuristics, or biases. In following the MLB trade deadline on Twitter, I saw a tweet from Jeff Passan that described Soto, Suarez, and Machado in three different aspects.
Great question, John. For most of baseball history, the walk was sneered at – a lesser form of getting on base compared to the exceptional skill it takes to swing. The analytical revolution in the game changed that. If the objective of the game is to outscore a team, then the…
To summarize, Passan describes three metrics: batting average (BA), on-base percentage (OBP), and slugging (SLG). Passan shares the Moneyball principle in that modern statistics have turn to other statistics to evaluate a hitter; old baseball viewed walks as a “lesser” hit. Each of these metrics tells a different story about the players. BA is the simplest, describing how often a player gets a hit. OBP is the percentage of times a player reaches base, which includes hits, walks, and hit by pitches. Slugging is the total number of bases a player gets per at-bat, which includes singles, doubles, triples, and home runs - its like batting average but weighted by the type of hit.
