Welcome to another edition of Saber rattling. I haven’t been fired yet, so here we go!
Today I want to introduce the idea that statistics is the language of baseball. It’s a theme I’ve touched on in other articles. The truth is it deserves its own space. More importantly, you can’t truly understand baseball as an historic cultural artifact if you don’t at least speak some of the language.
I am hardly the first person to suggest that statistics is a language. Statistics has been called the language of science for some time. It’s a language for any scientific pursuit. I recognize that many people have no interest in mixing science and baseball. That’s fine. Baseball is one of your preferred entertainment outlets. I’m not here to undermine that. I would offer that gaining proficiency in the language “baseball scientists” use will increase your access to higher-level conversations about the game.
You are undoubtedly familiar with terms like batting average, earned run average, and strikeout percentage. These are just a few of the numerous basic concepts in the language of baseball statistics. Perhaps, you’re aware of newer ideas like on-base-plus-slugging-percentage (OPS). You might even toss these words into a hearty discussion about how well your favorite player did in 1980. If so, you are more proficient with statistics than you may have realized. Of course, learning any language requires a comfort level with new words before entering our lexicon.
The MLB website lists 72 separate “standard” statistics between defense, hitting, pitching, and team data. Another 49 statistics make up the “advanced” glossary. Other baseball websites, such as Baseball Almanac, offer considerable overlap with MLB’s working set of terms, even offering tools to help readers find specific statistics. All told, it speaks to a robust language barrier for the casual fan to learn before fully understanding the game.
So, if baseball’s universal language is statistics, the game and its followers will naturally be littered with native speakers and those learning it as a foreign language. Using this context, it’s easy to get lost in vocabulary-rich conversations that might as well be in Ancient Greek. Even among native speakers, baseball offers varying levels of language proficiency. There is conversational baseball. It is considerably different from the vocabulary of academic baseball. While both of these are staples of the written language of the game, reading and writing about baseball introduces a new level of difficulty. It’s like leveling up on your favorite mobile phone game. Each new challenge incorporates some of what you’ve already mastered while throwing an entirely new wrinkle into the mix.
Despite the nuances of baseball statistics, once the language is proficiently mastered, it provides access to a world of possibilities. Examining a batter’s on-base percentage is the same skill across space, time, and culture. We can look at players from the Dominican Republic, South Korea, Italy, or Pocatello (ID) with the same frame of reference to determine if they are getting on base enough for their respective leagues.
It should also be understood that statistics is not math. It uses math to express findings from the data. Mathematics is purely a vehicle, taking a player’s performance from its raw observed state to a product that can be analyzed and evaluated for efficiency and effectiveness. Because of this delivery method, a person with limited language proficiency can still make a rudimentary decision about his favorite player. As your language proficiency increases, you can incorporate more sophisticated vocabulary to express the degrees of difference between players. This is where sabermetrics comes in. It provides a detailed and colorful description of Player X from Year Y compared with Player Z.
Not having access to this level of description limits your participation in the conversation and your ability to articulate meaningful attributes of the game. It would be like having only “hot” and “cold” to describe the weather. Yes, climate can be described using only those words. It loses context in the process, though. A man from Nantucket may feel the weather was unbearably hot, but that contextual description gets lost in translation when chatting with a fellow from Tucson.
Baseball statistics live in the same domain of language acquisition as our description of everyday events. They represent and explain cultural phenomena in a way that can be understood by someone who was not a witness to the event. Approaching statistics as the game’s language opens the door to look at our daily baseball vocabulary as a measure of receptive and expressive proficiency. Not everyone will want to become a linguistic scholar of the game. That’s just fine. At the same time, increasing our baseball language proficiency means we will have more people to interact with about the game we love. For me, that’s reason enough to continue to hone my craft in becoming more proficient with baseball statistics.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this weekly column. I want to challenge your thinking about baseball statistics. Someday, my own research on the game will become outdated. Please feel free to spar with me about the ideas I’ve presented here—I enjoy the discussion because it challenges my thinking. I can be reached here on Baseball Almanac, via email atchriswrites@schristophermichaels.com, and I’m on the social media (Facebook, Twitter). As always, this has been the World According to Chris. Thanks for tuning in.
