The Evolution of Stats
Unlike the “Evolution of Dance,” statistics did not evolve in the course of just a few minutes. Since baseball’s inception in the late 1800’s, the game had statistics. The first box scores though looked very different than the standard and advanced metrics we’ve all come to enjoy today. We’ve gone from a time in which baseball did not track walks to a time, now, where we track pitch movement, line drive percentages, and batting averages when a player makes contact with the ball. We’ve evolved, the sport has evolved, and the numbers that drive the sport have evolved.
In the featured image for this post, the box score was a simple display of runs, errors, and assists. Not unlike the box scores we see in newspapers today, this simple game recap gave fans all they needed. This, of course, was a time when the style of play was similar to our current beer-league softball games. The score above – 19 to 16 – is reflective of the poor pitching and poor defense of the time. This game alone saw 24 combined errors between the two teams. But the box score itself does give us insight into what fans found important in tracking the games of that era.
The home team was listed second and batted second in 1886. The score line, set up identical to today’s box scores, showed the runs each team scored by inning. In more detail, the player-specific stats showed runs scored, hits, put-outs, and what looks to be assists. Bases on balls do not seem to be tracked in this box score, and that may be for good reason. The definition of what constituted a base on balls had changed three times between 1877 and 1886. According to Baseball Almanac, two years prior to this game, the definition of a base on balls was reduced from eight called balls to six called balls.
Soon, base on balls would become a stat fans wanted to see. The box scores of the day would be altered to include this metric. Not only was base on balls an official stat, the sacrifice bunt became official in 1889. By 1917, earned runs was defined and added to the rule book. And the stats kept coming. Runs batted in were added in 1920. Sacrifice flys (once allowed under different rules) were brought back into play in 1931 and recorded as a statistic. Saves were added in 1969.
We went from caring just about the runs, the hits, and the errors in modern baseball, to wanting to know things like pitch count, balls, strikes, pitch-type, and MPH. We also wanted to know how many runners our team left on base throughout the game. I can still remember the first time I saw “LOB” added to a scoreboard at the ballpark. At the time, I had no idea what it meant, but I soon learned “left on base” tracked how ineffective my team was at getting runners on base to score.
As fans get smarter, as their access to the game increases through technology, they demand more. Where there’s a statistic, there is a person trying to find a way to make it better. That is the type of thinking that brought us brilliant new statistics from the mind of Bill James. In an article summarizing a 60 Minutes interview James did in 2008, James was quoted as saying:
"I went to a state university in the Midwest and they tried to teach me economics. And I took everything that they tried to teach me and applied it to baseball"
James certainly found ways to apply economics and other business-related philosophies to baseball. He did so in the form of numbers and analysis. James is credited with creating the following stats; Runs created, range factor, win shares, Pythagorean win percentage, and secondary average among others. He did so not just because he was a fan and wanted new stats. He did so because fans demanded it. He did so because the game needed ti.
So as we enter the 2012 season, we can look back at the game’s origins and the stats that went along with it. We can look back and see just how far we’ve come. Some may claim the simpler times were better. Some may yearn for the days when wins, RBI, and saves were reliable measures of a player’s success. But that’s not the time we live in. We live in a time with more available resources, more knowledge, and more stats. We’ve gone from simple box scores to Pitchf/x and this:
The evolution of stats has sped up over the last few years. It was a slow process originally, but as people demand more useful information, some choose to create their own measures of particular areas that conventional statistics ignore. Rest assured, if there is a statistic you’d like to see, it will exist soon enough. You may even be the one to create it.
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