The best* hitter in baseball this year (photo via dodgers.com)
wOBA is a fantastic tool for showing how valuable a player is offensively. It takes into account league contexts as well as the relative values of each way to get on base to provide a quick picture of how much someone contributes with the bat. Want to know who the best hitter in baseball has been a couple weeks into this season? wOBA is a great place to start. So who leads the sport so far? Adrian Gonzalez has set Dodger franchise records with his explosive start. Nelson Cruz has more home runs than some teams. Corey Seager is making headlines by tearing up the Texas league at just 21 years old. So it should come as no surprise when I tell you that the current best hitter in all of baseball is…Dodger reliever Juan Nicasio.
Is it a cheat to pick a relief pitcher with one plate appearance? Yes, but what makes this situation interesting is Nicasio is 0 for 1 this season, yet he’s still ahead of other guys sporting 1.000 batting averages in similar small sample sizes. This must be a bug, right?
If you read how we calculate wOBA you can see that one of the components that contributes to it is reaching via error, something almost no other offensive measurement gives a hitter credit for. On top of that, the run suppression that has happened all over the MLB the last few years has turned the National League into the most pitching friendly league in baseball. While reaching on an error is worth less than a single in the wOBA calculations getting on base is still so much more valuable in the NL than anywhere else that it’s worth more to reach on an error in the NL rather than get a hit in the Texas League.
The lesson here is that if you’re going to use stats, it’s important to know where they come from. Especially this early in the season these little quirks can end up having huge effects on the final numbers. By knowing how some of these weird results happen, you are better equipped to know how and when to use these tools. It’s become very popular lately to start quoting WAR figures this early in the season, but by taking the time to learn how WAR is calculated you’d learn that almost by design the UZR figures that make up a huge part of WAR are meaningless after two weeks. “Best hitter in baseball Juan Nicasio” is an extreme misapplication of stats, but the lesson is the same: there’s a time and place for all numbers, and it’s important to learn when that is before you use them.