Fantasy Baseball Stat School

Welcome to the first edition of Stat School.

Every Wednesday, I’ll be taking you through one crucial stat that you should be using in your player evaluations and how it affects future performance.

First, it’s important to cover an overarching philosophy on statistics that many fantasy people (and increasingly professional baseball organizations) use every day in their player evaluations.

It’s called Sabermetrics .

It was invented by Bill James in 1980 —an average joe who spent his nights working as a security guard thinking about how we treat baseball stats. In 1977, he first published his thoughts in a book called Baseball Abstracts.

Quickly, people began to realize the logic in his theories, to the point where major league organizations began using them as well. The most famous instance being Billy Beane ’s use of Sabermetrics with the Oakland Athletics, chronicled in Michael Lewis ’ book Moneyball .

James sums up his theory as the “the search for objective knowledge in baseball .”

Basically, the goal is to eliminate the subjective elements of a player’s numbers and focus as much as possible on the player’s ability to help score runs. A

fter all, that is the ultimate goal of the game.

Learn the rest here .