Those who seek to think clearly about the game of baseball can not only develop good ways of evaluating performance but also figure out how to treat the old, inferior ways.
Stat savants know, for example, that batting average and RBI are worse metrics than OBP and SLG. But they are more than just worse. They are redundant. They belong to a class of redundant stats: completely useless when better and equally simple stats are at hand, they deserve no place whatever in any kind of analysis.
Flawed stats are not necessarily redundant. Stolen bases is a flawed stat when it's deployed, as so often, to show a player's contributions to offense via the steal; stolen base percentage is vital to include because getting caught stealing hurts offensive production. Yet stolen bases is still a useful stat. It's raw data, for one, and together with caught stealing shows the magnitude of the baserunner's addition or subtraction to offense. Similarly, runs allowed per nine innings has long been seen as a flawed depiction of pitching performance because it punishes pitchers for fielding errors that lead to runs. Thus the "earned run" was invented and with it ERA, which exclude such run-causing errors. This was progress -- I suspect ERA is usually truer than RA. Still, runs allowed is worth attending to because better pitchers will record outs after errors instead of getting shelled. And so on: ERA is flawed for reasons that ERA+ addresses, but ERA remains somewhat useful (if only for being simpler). Any stat becomes a "flawed stat" when unjustified conclusions are drawn from it.
A few stats, however, are not only flawed but redundant, so bad they have no reason to exist. The ones that come to my mind happen to be the stats most often used to measure offensive production: batting average and RBI.
Batting average sort of, kind of, sometimes, hints at the thing OBP states precisely: how often a hitter gets on base instead of making outs. Now if walks, which batting average treats as non-events, were wholly the doing of the pitcher without regard to the batter's presence and actions, then batting average would be a fine stat. But walks are obviously the work of hitters too. Most hitters maintain stable walk rates over many years. That's because walking results from certain skills: the ability to tell balls from strikes, the ability to make contact to foul off close pitches, and the ability to hit for power, causing pitchers to nibble. If walks flowed solely from pitchers' mistakes, the difference between OBP and batting average would over time equalize for everyone, so it wouldn't much matter which stat is used. But some hitters consistently have large differentials between OBP and batting average, and others small.
Point is, batting average is redundant. If you want to know on-base ability, OBP is the stat to use. If you want to tell how often contact yields a hit, use batting average on balls hit in play. I can't see any purpose to which batting average should be put -- unless you're the agent of a hitter whose high contact rate produces a batting average more impressive than his OBP.
The redundancy of RBI is more obvious and less interesting. I'm not exactly sure which dimensions of offensive production RBI are supposed to show -- maybe clutchyish hitting plus slugging plus the crucial ability to hit a sac fly and exchange high-fives for making an out. At any rate, all those dimensions can be measured more effectively and still simply, without falling prey to RBI's glaring deficiency, its dependence on teammates getting on base. On the Big Red Machine,
I might have had decent RBI totals, though only because I'm short enough to draw the occasional bases-loaded walk and humble enough about my baseball skills to know to kidnap members of the opposing pitcher's family, Jack Bauer style, in order to get pitches to hit. In retrospect, RBI is somewhat problematic as a redundant stat, since it's hard to tell what RBI even purports to signify and therefore which stats should replace it. In that way, stupidity is the RBI's own best defense. I hate the RBI.
Are there other redundant stats? I hereby put this question to Primarily Baseball's horde(s) of fans.* One important quality of redundant stats is that they can't be too much simpler to calculate than the stats that replace them. Otherwise very complex stats, like runs created, could be argued to render almost every offensive stat redundant, and furthermore there's value in simplicity.
*According to the OED, one fan can comprise a horde, if he maintains facial hair and habitually walks around wielding a hand-whittled club. So: stop shaving and start whittling. It's probably not a terrible tradeoff if you whittle fast.P.S. Suzyn Waldman, August 9, 12:20 a.m., announcing a Yankees pitching chage: "And here comes Joe Torre . . ." She corrected herself after the commercial break, saying, "I'm a dope" and "I knew I would do that at least once this year." I agree with the former and share in the latter, but nice recovery, Suzyn.
P.P.S. I can't permit myself to type the name "Suzyn" without forswearing any intent to approve of the spelling.
