Better descriptive stats?

[RedsManRick]

You know, I wouldn't go out of the way to pander to the crowd, I'd just start putting the new slash up, mention it a few times here and there and let the people find out it's value. Be the authority and force the crowd to catch up.

Joey Votto 2-3, BB, HR Today
26/20/54

Almost like a horse racing program with all the codes you have to get up to snuff on. Indiscreet, but prominent, and definitely indispensable.

The racing comparison is also strangely apt since I do feel these new numbers do sort of lend themselves to a pure odds perspective. I worry a little bit that the game would be reduced to slot machine analysis.

Yep. This is how the more progressive broadcasts have been doing it with OBP and OPS -- they don't get rid of the existing stuff, they supplement.

Regarding the .123 format vs. the 12% format, my concern is that without a sufficient formatting break, you're going to confuse people when you say that Votto went from being a ".334 hitter (based on AVG)" to a ".262 hitter (based on Hit%)". The cognitive dissonance would just be too much. But that's definitely the kind of conversation/testing I'd want to have.

[FlightRick]

Regarding the .123 format vs. the 12% format, my concern is that without a sufficient formatting break, you're going to confuse people when you say that Votto went from being a ".334 hitter (based on AVG)" to a ".262 hitter (based on Hit%)". The cognitive dissonance would just be too much. But that's definitely the kind of conversation/testing I'd want to have.

I concur that expressing these stats as whole number percentages would help people "get" them more easily. (1) No confusion with existing rate stats, (2) the thousandths place is pretty useless, and (3) this particular set of stats always adds up to 100 (which is more easy/intuitive than adding up to 1.000, and will further re-inforce the uderlying principle that all outcomes go into one of these three categories).

Someone mentioned above that context would help, too. Instead of adding another row of numbers below the current one, how about just going with color coding for each percentage? More serious fans will know what numbers are good or bad as a rule of thumb, but casual ones can slowly catch on if you do a 5-shade color system to distinguish bottom 10%, next 25%, middle 30%, next 25%, top 10%. More numbers are scary! But colors are pretty! [Of course, for pitchers or part time players, you've got PA listed, and just do their stats in gray or whatever.]


Rick

[BluegrassRedleg]

At the risk of steering this somewhere else, this chart is great, but makes me even more upset about what the Reds are doing with the 2 hole.

Choo and Votto have been outstanding. To be hovering around the 50% line is awesome.

[RedsManRick]

This felt apropos:

http://library.la84.org/SportsLibrar...16/bbm165j.pdf

"“Why the System of Batting Averages Should Be Changed" -- circa 1915.

Suppose you asked a close personal friend how much change he had in his pocket and he replied, "Twleve coins," would you think had learned much about the precise state of his exchequer?

Would a system that placed nickels, dimes, quarters and fifty cent pieces on the same basis be much of a system whereby to compute a man's financial resources? Anyone who offered such a system would deserve to be examined as to his mental condition. And yet it is precisely such a loose, inaccurate system which obtains in baseball and lies at the root of the most popular branch of baseball statistics.