Just an old dude, me

I took a read at a sabermetrics site this morning and had a reinforcement: Most baseball statistics I no longer understand; and, none can measure what a player really is. Some things with which I am not familiar: RAR, eRA, dRA, BABIP, BP/UZR/DRS fielding runs saved. And then I happened upon a code explanation.

Park Factor (PF), Home Run Park Factor (PFhr), Winning Percentage (W%), Expected W% (EW%), Predicted W% (PW%), wins, losses, runs, runs allowed, Runs Created (RC), Runs Created Allowed (RCA), Home Winning Percentage (HW%), Road Winning Percentage (RW%) [exactly what they sound like--W% at home and on the road], Runs/Game (R/G), Runs Allowed/Game (RA/G), Runs Created/Game (RCG), Runs Created Allowed/Game (RCAG), and Runs Per Game (the average number of runs scored an allowed per game). 

Still doesn’t explain most stuff, and I really don’t care. Old school me: Batting average; wins/losses; ERA; fielding average; total chances; stolen bases; RBI; home runs; runs scored; saves, and etc.

And here we go with what looks like “How to manipulate numbers so they do whatever you want them to do”:

iPF = (H*T/(R*(T - 1) + H) + 1)/2
where H = RPG in home games, R = RPG in road games, T = # teams in league (14 for AL and 16 for NL). Then the iPF is converted to the PF by taking x*iPF + (1-x), where x = .6 if one year of data is used, .7 for 2, .8 for 3, and .9 for 4+.

Some of the new statistics people could come up with a dozen measurable reasons why Babe Ruth was not a really good ball player.