Glossary

Posted: July 31st, 2009 | Filed under: Baseball | No Comments »

09/09/09 – The sort-of release date of The Machine, the book I wrote about the 1975 Cincinnati Reds. I’m told this is a “soft” release date, which means that books might be available a little bit before or a little bit after. But I’m sticking with 09/09/09.

BR — Abbreviation for “Brilliant Reader.” All readers of this blog are Brilliant Readers. It is up to the individual reader to determine their own level of irony (submitted by BR Alex).

Circle Me Bert — What some Brilliant Readers — as homage to Minnesota Twins announcer and blog favorite Bert Blyleven — write as comment when they believe they are the first ones to post. This has caused a great deal of consternation for other Brilliant Readers who believe this is a stupid and pointless exercise. Your humble blogger finds it semi-amusing, especially when the readers come up with a variation on the theme (such as “Circle Me James Madison” when the overall post discusses constitutional matters).

Dewan Plus/Minus – My go-to defensive statistic, this was invented by John Dewan, and it as I understand it, the numbers determines (using film study and computer comparisons) how many more or fewer successful plays a defensive player will make than league average. For instance, if a shortstop makes a play that only 24% of shortstops make, he will get .76 of a point (1 full point mine .24). If a shortstop BLOWS a play that 82% of shortstops make, then you subtract .82 of a point. And at the end, you add it all up and get a plus/minus.

OPS+ – One of my favorite statistics, it is basically OPS (On-base-percentage PLUS Slugging Percentage) measured against league average while taking into ballpark effects into account. All you really need to know is 100 is league average and that every number higher than 100 is a percentage point better than league average, everything lower than 100 is a percentage point worse than league average.

The best ever OPS+ for a season was Barry Bonds in 2002 with a 268.

Tony Pena in 2008 had a 7 OPS+, which is really bad.

UZR — Another of my favorite statistics, it is officially “Ultimate Zone Rating” and can be found at the outstanding Fangraphs Website. The Fangraphs definition is: “The number of runs above or below average a fielder is in both range runs, outfield arm runs, double play runs and error runs combined.”