Walk Like a Sabermetrician: Esoteric Ramblings About +

Yerps! I don’t have time (filtering new Slow Animal hooky-dooky product is eating it all up!) to take this all in right now.

My own personal preference is for aERA, since I’m not bothered by lower being better and because, when possible, I prefer statistics that offer both ratio and differential comparability. However, if the adjusted ERA standard must display above-average as >100, then I prefer ERA#.

What bothers me most about the debate I’ve seen is not that people can’t express what ERA+ really means or that fuzzy terminology is used, but the impression I get that some people have placed certain statistics on a pedestal and never want to see them change, even if the changes are sound. When sabermetric formulas are treated as inviolable constants, the entire purpose of sabermetrics goes out the window.

I don’t mean to suggest that any alteration to a sabermetric statistic, no matter how marginal the benefit, should be implemented immediately and without discussion. That too would go against the spirit of the field. But it’s important to remember that sabermetrics is always moving forward (or at least striving to move forward), and from time-to-time new and better methods will be developed. If and when there is a backlash to those newer methods simply because they are new, then ERA+ and OPS+ and the other statistics have simply become a new-age version of BA, HR, RBI, Wins—numbers celebrated for their own sake, rather than for what they tell us about the game.