A Fan's Guide to Baseball Analytics: Why WAR, WHIP, wOBA, and Other Advanced Sabermetrics Are Essential to Understanding Modern Baseball

When Bonds was intentionally walked 120 times in 2004, do you know who was second? Jim Thome. With 26. Intentional walks were not up around the game. They were only up for him. Bonds was playing at his own level.

in 1920, a 25-year-old Hornsby—a lifetime .310/.370/.440 hitter to that point—hit .370/.431/.559, leading the league in all three splits, and he also led the league in hits, doubles, RBIs, and total bases. Over the next five seasons combined—this is so ridiculous—Hornsby would hit .402. Nobody, not even Ty Cobb, hit .400 over five full seasons.

The puzzles that the Jane Street traders gave Sam to solve were designed, like the betting games, to expose blind spots in his mind. The one about baseball was the simplest example. What are the odds that I have a relative who is a professional baseball player? one of the Jane Street traders had asked him. Sam’s first thought was to define the prob

“There is no one way to hit,” Yelich said in October 2018. Nor is there one way to develop players.

Today’s technology tracks everything, allowing progressive players to dissect their performance with unprecedented depth. The better they understand their current technique, the easier to analyze how it could be better.