With the influx of talent or casual Blue Jays fans returning to the fold, many folks are likely scanning the team’s stats on the scoreboards around the park to catch up with what’s been happening up to this point and how the team has reached its now-dizzying heights.
They say that numbers never lie, but at a quick glance, some can be more deceiving than others.
The following are a few statistics that stand out this season for being misleading on their face, coupled with some appropriate context:
José Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion’s batting average
While at the Royals series a couple of weeks ago, I was seated in front of a couple of gentlemen who strenuously advocated for trading both José Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion. The rationale? That their batting averages were so low that they were dragging the team down.
Where to even start with this?
If you have been conditioned by the tiny print on the back of baseball cards over the years to think that batting average is an important statistic, you could certainly find yourself wondering about Bautista’s .241 and Encarnacion’s .251 marks.
But consider that the Blue Jays have led the league in runs scored for most of the season and currently lead the third-place Arizona Diamondbacks by 101 runs, 615 to 514. That’s roughly the same disparity that exists between the Diamondbacks and the Florida Marlins, the league’s least productive offence with 419 runs.
Does it seem to you as though offence is a problem?
While batting average holds a traditional place of honour in baseball, it diminishes the value of walks, and weighs slap singles or bunts the same as majestic, tape-measure home runs. On-base percentage is a much better gauge of a player’s anticipated rate of success in at-bats, as it essentially tells you how often players don’t make outs. Not making an out is as important as getting a hit in any given at bat.
Bautista’s .359 on-base percentage is good enough for 30th in all of baseball and is just three points behind Josh Donaldson’s team-leading .362. Encarnacion is not far behind at .349.
Moreover, Bautista is 18th in the league in slugging percentage, which measures a batter’s power by figuring how far around the bases a player gets per at-bat. Encarnacion, who has struggled somewhat with his power this season, still sits 38th in slugging out of 155 batters who have enough at-bats to qualify for the batting title.
If I had my way, I would supplant batting average on all of the in-stadium signage with OPS, or on-base plus slugging. While not a perfect metric, it combines a typical success rate with a weighted power measurement to provide an index for assessing players. If OPS were posted, fans could see Bautista as one of the best on the field on any given day, sitting 19th in MLB, while Encarnacion is still a respectable 35th.
The Blue Jays don’t bunt
This is less about the numbers that are on the board than the perception of fans who expect mosquito league baseball tactics to be on display at the game’s highest level.
Seemingly, because the Blue Jays don’t lay down a bunt in the first inning to move a runner up 90 feet, they are perceived to be a team that is over-reliant on the long ball and can’t “manufacture” runs.
But a look at the actual numbers doesn’t bear this notion out.
While I personally find John Gibbons to be judicious in his use of small ball, it should be noted that the Blue Jays are third in the American League in sacrifices. In all of baseball, they are 16th in this statistic, in part because of the perceived necessity of having National League pitchers sacrifice.
And who leads the league in sacrifices? The same Marlins who have scored fewer runs than anyone in baseball. Kinda makes you think, doesn’t it?
Finally, the Blue Jays are ninth in MLB and third in the AL in bunt hits with 18 this season. While I’m generally averse to small ball in many forms, a smart bunt for a base hit can be a pleasure to behold in a tight game.
Drew Hutchison’s having a good season
On a Montreal radio station on the day the David Price trade broke, one of the voices mentioned in passing that Drew Hutchison was having a really good season.
I nearly drove into a telephone pole.
If you haven’t yet been convinced of the fact that pitchers shouldn’t be judged by their win-loss records, Hutchison (and his offensive teammates) are doing yeoman’s work to dispossess us all of any lingering attachment to those stats.
Hutchison’s 11-2 record this season is a bizzarro world version of Nolan Ryan’s 1987 season and serves equally well as an exemplification of the limitations of the win-loss assessment. In that season, the Ryan Express tied with Toronto’s Jimmy Key for the best ERA in baseball with a 2.76 mark, while posting an 8-16 record.
Even after his refreshing performance this week, Hutchison still has the fifth worst ERA for pitchers qualifying for the ERA title, while his run support is a staggering 6.87 runs per game.
To be charitable, advanced stats like Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP) figures that Hutchison has been somewhat unlucky, though still not still not great. Oddly enough, FIP figures that Hutchison’s performance (3.93) might actually be better than that of Mark Buehrle (4.24).