By Nate Sanchez

Senior Columnist

Baseball is a game of numbers. There’s no looking past it. Every aspect of the game is given a numeric value to illustrate the player’s worth. Give me a completed box score and I could narrate the game without even watching it.

People have a funny way of looking at these numbers, though. Since baseball has a tendency of holding on to the past, the recent shakeup in the world of baseball analytics is causing a divide among those who observe “the old ways” and those who are right.

I’ve taken an issue with two pitching and two hitting stats. For the next couple of weeks, I’ll take you through one of each.

Pitching

Wins: Wins have been the ruler by which pitchers have been measured for over a century, and it’s unfair. “A pitcher’s job is to win games,” is the mantra of those who cling to this statistic. A pitcher’s job is not to win games. A pitcher’s job is to prevent the other team from scoring runs.

Scoring runs is how you win games. At the end of nine innings, the winning team isn’t the one that recorded the most strikeouts or allowed fewer walks. A win is a team stat that is dependent on the team’s ability to score, which is almost completely out of the pitcher’s control; unless the pitcher hits a solo home run and pitches a nearly perfect game.

Alternative Method, FIP:

Fielding independent pitching (FIP) explains the Brandon McCarthy dilemma. If you don’t know, the Yankees got some negative feedback for acquiring McCarthy from the Arizona Diamondbacks. McCarthy had a high Earned Run Average (ERA) and not too many wins to his name, rendering him trash to too many fans. Yankees general manager Brian Cashman looked beyond this and cashed in.

See, FIP looks past ERA and, instead of looking at just runs scored over nine innings, examines ERA stripped of lucky defensive plays and only focuses on things the pitchers actually control. This means strikeouts, walks, hit batters and home runs. The closer a FIP value is to 1.00, the better it is. The higher the value goes, the worse it is.

FIP is better as an analytic tool because it’s an equalizer for pitchers who play for terrible defensive teams like the Diamondbacks, who are the second-worst defensive team in Major League Baseball.

Hitting:

Average: My problem with average is exactly that. It’s average. You can’t possibly think that you can adequately judge a player with a stat that judges home runs and singles as equals while completely disregarding walks. A high batting average is great, but it’s a huge generalization when it comes to judging a hitter.

Ben Revere and Miguel Cabrera may only be separated by .002 points on their batting average, but does that put Revere in the same talent bracket as Cabrera? NO. NO IT DOES NOT.

Alternative Method, OBP:

On-Base Percentage is a better tool than average. It takes into account the fact that walks and hits are basically the same thing. Walks are wildly underestimated in the game. Plate discipline is among one of the most valuable skills a player can have, and it goes without saying that a triple is far more favorable than a base hit.

The ability to draw a walk has been gaining value ever since Brad Pitt led the Oakland Athletics to Hollywood stardom. I favor OBP over average for this reason. Average is exclusive to hits, but generalizes them all into a single category. OBP sees everything as it is. You can’t score unless you get on base.

Stay tuned next week for Part 2!