Statistics has helped man summarize sports and evaluate individuals ever since men figured out what to do with their free time. You will find stats from ancient Greece, where they measured how far someone threw a javelin, to last week’s horse race, where they can tell you how many times the winning horse’s heart beat per minute as it crossed the finish line. And, of course, you can find a wide range of useful and not so useful stats for analyzing baseball. Baseball’s natural pace seems to easily lend itself to record keeping and this, in turn, leads to creating more stats as a way to usefully keep record.
One stat that I use quite often is OPS. OPS is short hand for On Base Percentage plus Slugging Percentage. It is one of the relatively new wave of statistical measurements that have become mainstream in baseball. In the earliest days of baseball’s history, there were only several basic stats that were used. Batting average, runs scored and runs allowed (for example), and these were probably (in some form) taken from Cricket since they translated to the newer game very easily. Every few years someone will devise a new stat to measure a part of baseball that they deem as important. That is, important to that individual personally or important to help them describe/analyze a part of the game that was hard to properly discuss.
It usually takes a while for a new stat to become accepted by the mainstream and for Major League Baseball to adopt it as an official one. And the OPS stat was no exception. OPS originally surfaced in a 1984 book titled “The Hidden Game of Baseball”. Shortly after, The New York Times carried this stat in its weekly leader section. At some point the incredible baseball journalist Peter Gammons started to use OPS as a viable stat to help describe and analyze the players he was discussing. This accelerated the popularity of OPS and in 2004 it even showed up on Topps baseball cards!
How is OPS used? It is considered an advanced stat, not just a simple stat with an independently intrinsic value, since combining other stats generates it. OPS’s true value comes from being a useful, if slightly flawed, tool to compare hitters. It is simplistic in its comparison approach though, so most baseball people don’t always treat it as a first class stat. This is because OPS’s two main components (OBP and SLG) have equal weight, but the two components can arguably mean totally different things when describing a hitter.
On Base Percentage fundamentally corresponds to the most basic of stats, runs scored. The more times you can get on base the greater chance you have to score. Slugging Percentage fundamentally corresponds to the ability to drive the ball. SLG uses the player's total bases accumulated from their hits. The more extra base hits will equal more total bases, ergo the better you drive the ball the higher your slugging percentage will be.
The people who argue that these two stats should not be weighted equally do have a point worth noting since OPS by itself will always favor the slugger over the singles hitter. Most years the OPS leaders are simply dominated by sluggers with maybe one or two “speedsters” or singles hitters in the top 15 or top 20.
2011 Top ten OPS Leaders:
Jose Bautista 1.056
Miguel Cabrera 1.033
Ryan Braun .994
Matt Kemp .986
Prince Fielder .981
Lance Berkman .959
Adrian Gonzalez .957
David Ortiz .953
Joey Votto .947
Jacoby Ellsbury .928
How many singles hitters or speedsters do you see on this list? The lowest homerun total on this list was 27, provided by Adrian Gonzalez. The highest OPS last season by a hitter with fewer than 20 homers? That would be Alex Avila’s 19 homers to go with his .895 OPS. That OPS was good enough for 19th best in the majors. The highest OPS last season by a hitter with fewer than 10 homeruns? That would be the NL batting champ Jose Reyes’s 7 homers to go with his .877 OPS. That was good enough for 26th place in the majors.
So if OPS isn’t a completely accurate comparison stat for hitters why use it? Because OPS has great value as a quicker, more compact, discussion method. Shorthand if you will. Instead of having to compare on base percentage and then separately compare slugging percentage, then diagnose both those stats, you simply combine the two and make do with OPS’s flaw. I know that when I write and discuss a hitter’s general season I always use OPS. If I need to make a more direct point when discussing a player then I will break out On Base and Slugging as needed. OPS, despite it’s flaw, has become a much more popular stat for baseball fans and analysts. While, on the other hand, teams and coaches do not give it nearly as much value.
Finally, it may be that OPS has actually become a better tool for describing a pitcher’s season then previously thought. The level of success that a pitcher had can be measured with OPS against them and that seems to be a fairly accurate tool that more and more analysts are using.
In leaving, I present a list of the top ten CAREER leaders in OPS:
Babe Ruth 1.164
Ted Williams 1.116
Lou Gehrig 1.080
Barry Bonds 1.051
Jimmy Fox 1.038
Albert Pujols 1.037
Hank Greenberg 1.017
Rogers Hornsby 1.010
Manny Ramirez 0.997
Mark McGwire 0.982
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