Baseball Primer Newsblog— The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand
Tuesday, May 16, 2023
Six weeks into the season, the deal has paid off and then some. Bellinger is hitting .288/.360/.530, good for an OPS+ of 141 that makes him 41% above league average as a hitter. His April was so good that it was his best month in four years. Throw in the defense that’s been as advertised, and he rates as one of baseball’s dozen most valuable position players, at least so far as FanGraphs is concerned.
So he’s “back,” right? Well, no—not in the way you think. This version of Bellinger is a quality player, but one that in many ways hardly resembles the ascendant superstar who won the NL Rookie of the Year Award in 2017 and the NL MVP Award in 2019. As he nears his 28th birthday this summer, we’re seeing yet another of the seemingly endless iterations of Bellinger. Will this one last?
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1. Walt Davis Posted: May 16, 2023 at 05:04 PM (#6128494)Or about 20% but whatever!! What's a factor of two beteen friends? (And of course it doesn't "make" him anything, it "means" he is ...)
Anyway, off to a very fine start but ran into the wall yesterday.
Or about 20% but whatever!! What's a factor of two beteen friends?
My tentative understanding is that OPS+ is scaled the way it is because this way an OPS+ of, say, 141, corresponds to a hitter whose estimated run production is roughly 41% above league average.
And the scale wasn't chosen for anything beyond the desire to put league average at 100. The people who came up with OPS+ never tested how well it works as you move away from 100. Among other things, convenient online databases didn't exist before the Lahman database and OPS+ predates those. It was always intended as nothing more than a quick and dirty way to park adjust OPS.
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