195 – Contributed Oral Poster Presentations: Section on Statistics in Sports
A Modification of OPS: Widely Used to Measure a Baseball Batter's Performance
Chulmin Kim
Rochester Institute of Technology
Batting average (BA), home runs (HRs), and runs batted in (RBIs) have been the most dominant statistics to measure a baseball batter's performance. Since each of those contains a meaningful interpretation but also some drawback to explain a batter's ability at the same time, often we use those three together. Slugging percentage (SLG) and onbase percentage (OBP) have been used as alternatives of the traditional three statistics. SLG measures how often a batter hits and how valuable the hits are and OBP measures how often a batter reaches bases. Whereas SLG ignores reaching bases by hits by pitched ball or walks, OBP is limited to measure the quality of the hits. A combination of these two is called OPS, the sum of OBP and SLG, which has become more widely used. We introduce a variation of OPS, WOA (weighted offensive average), which is a single number explaining not only a batter's hitting performance but also his non-hitting performance to generate runs for his team such as stolen bases, walks, and etc. This newly developed statistic is based on major league team statistics from the year 2000 to the year 2008.
