Fantasy Will Deliver Us From Evil
Tom Tango has an interesting plan for how to get on-base percentage to supplant batting average in the consciousness of your average American baseball fan.
And the school of OBP must start with Fantasy Baseball. Why don’t the Fantasyers simply go with OBP over BA? If they do that, they’ll overpower those who pray to the church of BA, and OBP will become mainstream. After we settle that one, then we can figure out Palestine and Israel.
As someone who works in “the biz,” I often forget how powerful fantasy sports have become, but I think Tango is on the right track here — as far as on-base percentage has come this decade, rotisserie baseball might be the key to it replacing batting average as the hallmark rate statistic.
Think about it: baseball fans these days probably peruse statistics more for their fantasy team than for any other single reason. What’s more useful to your average fantasy baseball player — OBP or BA? The answer is so obvious, I don’t even have to say it. BA might be an inferior way of judging a baseball player in the real world, but Ichiro is going to do a lot more to help you win your standard 5×5 fantasy league than Brian Giles, even if Giles might be just as good or even better than Ichiro.
I’ve never understood why OBP isn’t the go-to stat now (though I can understand why the earliest statisticians tracked BA instead because of the way the game was played in the 19th century). Unlike some of the scarier-sounding sabermetric stats, it’s extremely accessible and provides a pretty clear picture of a player’s basic skillset.
But here we are anyway. Like Mr. Tango, I’m not optimistic that OBP will supplant BA in your standard Yahoo public league anytime soon, even if it should.