One statistic however is constantly overlooked, and that is on-base percentage. Every year players compete for the batting title, a competition to see who can achieve the highest batting average. The triple crown award consists of batting average, home runs, and runs batted in (a statistic that is actually pretty worthless in determining a player's true value), giving no thought to on-base percentage.
Sabermetricians and innovative baseball thinkers have a problem with this.
Think about it this way, unlike all the other major sports, baseball is an untimed game. Teams do not have 60 minutes to work with, they have 27 outs. What teams do with those 27 outs determines if they win or lose. Outs are a valuable commodity. Every time a batter gets out, the game gets 3.7% closer to ending. That said, the team that avoids outs the most will win the game much more often than not.
How do we measure that, you ask? The answer is on-base percentage. Every time a player comes to the plate, one of two things can happen - that player can record an out, or they can reach base (alright, of course, the player could do both of these things with a fielders choice, but that is considered making an out and not reaching base). On-base percentage measures how often a player does not record an out, and therefore how often the player does not draw his team closer to losing.
Billy Beane was one of the first GMs to ever truly let this thinking change the way he worked. Beane was constantly chasing after players that other teams had no real interest in, because of their on-base percentage. Nobody really understood his thinking, in fact he was one of the most criticized GMs in the history of the game. However, his stuff worked, and nobody really knew why. All of this is written about in Michael Lewis's book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, a book that I highly recommend for any baseball fan.
So all of that said, let's take a look at the 2010 Pittsburgh Pirates leaders in on-base percentage. Bet you can't guess who was #1...
| Rk | Pos | G | PA | AB | H | BB | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | CF | Andrew McCutchen | 154 | 653 | 570 | 163 | 70 | .286 | .365 |
| 2 | 2B | Neil Walker# | 110 | 469 | 426 | 126 | 34 | .296 | .349 |
| 3 | LF | Jose Tabata | 102 | 441 | 405 | 121 | 28 | .299 | .346 |
| 4 | RF | Lastings Milledge | 113 | 412 | 379 | 105 | 28 | .277 | .332 |
| 5 | C | Ryan Doumit# | 124 | 456 | 406 | 102 | 41 | .251 | .331 |
| 6 | 3B | Pedro Alvarez* | 95 | 386 | 347 | 89 | 37 | .256 | .326 |
| 7 | 1B | Garrett Jones* | 158 | 654 | 592 | 146 | 53 | .247 | .306 |
| 8 | SS | Ronny Cedeno | 139 | 502 | 468 | 120 | 23 | .256 | .293 |
| Team Totals | 162 | 5973 | 5386 | 1303 | 463 | .242 | .304 | ||
| Rank in 16 NL teams | 16 | 16 | 15 | 16 | 15 |
Provided by Baseball-Reference.com
The league average in team on-base percentage in 2010 was .325, so it's no surprise to see the Pirates significantly below that, ranked 15th of 16 teams in the National League.
The National League on-base percentage pace was set by Reds first baseman Joey Votto, who led the league with a .424 OBP. Votto also hit for a .324 batting average, which was also near the top of the league. An interesting player in this situation is Prince Fielder, who was 3rd in the National League with a .401 on-base percentage, while hitting only .261. He was way above average at getting on base, but right around average in batting average. 2010 was considered a down year for Fielder, but was actually his 2nd best year in terms of not making outs (he had a .412 OBP in his monstrous 2009 season).
A big hit the Pirates took in on-base percentage in 2010 was because of Garrett Jones, who posted an awful .306 percentage. Five of the top ten OBPs in the National League were posted by first baseman, including all of the top 3. First base is not a demanding defensive position, which is why teams always try to find the best hitters to play that position. It's rare to find a player that is a very good defender as well as a very good hitter, so the smart thing to do is to put your best hitters at places where there is not as much defensive focus, so they can exert most their efforts into hitting the ball while still not hurting the team with their lesser defensive skills. When compared to the Pittsburgh Pirates, Jones was one of the Pirates better hitters, however when you compare him to the rest of the first baseman in the league, he was one of the worst. He is going to improve fast, or he will not be at first base for long (my guess is that Alvarez will be there in 2012).
The Pirates had nobody close to even approaching the .400 mark in OBP, which is a huge reason why we were unsuccessful on offense. The team is young and guys like Jose Tabata, Neil Walker, and Pedro Alvarez should have rising OBP's as they become more comfortable and more mature at the plate in the future.