I’m going to do something dangerous here.  I’m going to write a post without knowing how it’s going to end.  I’m just going to kind of feel my way through it and hope that I come up with something that makes sense.

I’ve been thinking about on-base percentage a lot recently.  I grew up at a time when batting average was the “go to” stat.  If a guy was a .300 hitter, he was a good hitter.  The closer he got to .200, the less valuable he was.

RBI was also an important stat.  The more runs your team scored, the better your chance of winning, so scoring runs and driving in runs was important.

From a baseball statistics perspective, it was a more simple time.  Many of today’s stats hadn’t been invented yet, and the ones that were, were either poorly understood or barely utilized.

As I’ve grown older and statistics have become more sophisticated, I’ve tried to understand and embrace them.  I don’t want to be a Luddite, unwilling to accept that there is a better way.  I want to be one of those guys that gets advanced statistics annd use them to better understand player and team performance.

And yet, I bristle at some of the statistics I run across.  Many are difficult to understand and often are unnecessarily complex.  Part of the problem is that I’m not particularly adept at mathematics, so some of the stats are simply beyond my ability to comprehend.  That’s okay, if they make sense and shed light on a player’s performance, I can accept the numbers even if I don’t understand the equation that created them.  After all, I don’t know how to wire a house, but I have no trouble turning on a light switch. 

And then there’s on-base percentage.  It’s an easily understood statistic.  On-base percentage — or OBP — is the percentage of time a player reaches base divided by the player’s number of plate appearances.  Unlike batting average, which only considers a player’s hits divided by their official at-bats, OBP considers all plate appearances, and adds walks and hit-by-pitch into the equation.

I like OBP.  I think you can tell a lot about a hitter by looking at OBP.  It must be a good statistic because there are a lot of people who call it “the single most important statistic” or “the ‘go to’ statistic.”  They compare players based largely on their OBP and they often eschew what they see with their own eyes in favor of quoting a player’s OBP.

A while back, I wrote a post explaining why I thought Andre Dawson should be in the Hall of Fame.  In that post, I quoted Joe Posnanski, who was opposed to Dawson’s candidacy primarily because his OBP was too low.

Posnanski wrote:

“On-base percentage is not some convoluted modern statistic. On-base percentage is not something new … it goes back to the time before Ty Cobb. On-base percentage is not even about walks. On-base percentage is simply the core of baseball, the very heart of it since the first ball hit the first stick. It is about how many times a batter gets on — and, conversely, how many times he makes outs. It is what the game is all about.

“It isn’t about walks, it really isn’t. That’s one thing everyone seems to miss. You say OBP and everyone says, “Oh, walks.” But that’s not it. Walks and hits by pitch make up a pretty small portion of on-base percentage. Most of it is hitting.”

Joe says that OBP is not about walks or hit-by-pitch, it’s about hitting.  In fact, he says walks and hit-by-pitch make up a very small portion of OBP.  If that is the case, why do we place such emphasis on OBP over batting average?  Why has batting average recently been relegated to the back seat while OBP sits up front?

Despite my immense respect for Joe Posnanski, I have to disagree with him here.  OBP is about walks and HBP.  If it wasn’t, we’d just stick with batting average.  Walks, in particular, play a large role in OBP, not just in the number, but in the way people, particularly those that consider themselves “stat heads,” perceive OBP.

For instance — and I almost hate to bring this up – a lot of “stat heads” were excited (or at least happily approved of) the signing of Milton Bradley by the Cubs last year.  In 2008, Bradley led the American League in OBP, and his signing was viewed as a step in the right direction for a Cubs front office that had the reputation of being stat ignorant.   Finally, it was claimed, the Cubs had joined the 21st century and were ready to give OBP it’s due.

Forget for the moment Bradley’s disciplinary problems.  He is a troubled man, but that is not important to this discussion.  What is important is that Bradley had an OBP in 2008 of .436 and a career OBP of .371 (post-2009).  In fact, Bradley has had a good or really good OBP every year since 2003.  And yet, his stats for runs and RBI have not been very impressive during that period.  For instance, he scored 78 runs and had 77 RBI in 2008 with Texas.  Those were both career highs for him.  As a general rule, Bradley doesn’t score many runs nor does he knock in many runners.

“But wait,” I can hear my sabermetric friends say.  “Runs and RBI are team dependent.  Plus, Bradley has a history of injury, so he rarely plays a full season.”  Fair enough.  Then let’s look at Bradley’s numbers in 2003 with the Los Angeles Dodgers.  Bradley played 141 games that year, the most in his career.

During the 2004 season, Bradley hit .267 with an OBP of .362.  He had 67 RBI and scored 72 runs.   The Dodgers scored 761 runs and finished first in the NL West with a record of 93-69.  The average number of runs that year in the NL was 751, so the Dodgers were slightly above average in run production.

Contrast those numbers with what Andre Dawson did for the Cubs in 1991.  That year, Dawson played 149 games, just eight more than Bradley played in 2004.  In 1991, Dawson hit .272 with an OBP of just .302.  And yet, Dawson fininshed the year scoring 69 runs and he drove in 104.

In 1991, the Cubs scored a total of 690 runs.  The league average was 681 runs.

Let’s compare the numbers:

                                                   Games        PA      Batting Avg      OBP      Runs      RBI      Team Runs      Lge Avg

Milton Bradley                            141            597           .267             .362         72         67              761                  751
Andre Dawson                          149            596           .272             .302         69        104             690                  681

The numbers that should jump out at you are Bradley’s 60 more points of OBP than Dawson and Dawson’s 37 more RBI than Bradley.  It’s worth mentioning also that Dawson achieved those 37 additional RBI on a Cubs team that scored 71 fewer total runs than Bradley’s Dodgers. 

So, why the big difference in OBP?  In 2004, Bradley walked 71 times compared to the 22 times Dawson walked in 1991.  Bradley collected six HBP while Dawson collected five.  So the big difference is walks. 

Walks are good.  Walks can lead to good things.  I don’t want to diminish the importance of walks.  But what good did it do Bradley’s team that he walked so many times in 2004?  Obviously, the walks helped Bradley build a nice OBP, but they didn’t help his team all that much.  Those walks didn’t do a very good job of scoring runs or pushing other runners across the plate.

Really, we’re not talking about walks here.  We’re talking about approach.  I hate to resort to my own observations here, but sometimes you can tell things with your eyes.  In 2009 with the Cubs, Bradley would go up to the plate with runners in scoring position and he would look for the walk.  This sometimes resulted in him earning a base-on-balls, and moved the responsibility of driving in the runner(s) to someone else.  Other times (it seemed like a lot of times), it resulted in Bradley looking at strike three.  His approach to hitting is to earn a walk if possible so that the burden of driving in runs is put on someone else’s shoulders.

Dawson was just the opposite.  He viewed it as his responsibility to drive in runs.  And despite the fact that he drew very few walks and had a low OBP, he succeeded in driving in runs. 

I don’t want to leave anyone with the impression that I don’t think OBP is important or valuable.  That’s not the case.  All I’m saying is that OBP is not the end all, be all that some people make it out to be. 

Joe Posnanski speaks for a lot of stat heads when he says, “On-base percentage is simply the core of baseball…It is what the game is all about.”  I respectfully disagree.  Scoring more runs than your opponent is what the game is all about.  To the extent that OBP can help you score more runs than your opponent, then I’m all for.  But I think it is important to recognize that OBP by itself doesn’t win games.

When I started this post, I said that I wasn’t sure how it was going to end.  I’m still not sure.  I want to again drive home the point that I am not opposed to OBP.  I’m simply saying that OBP by itself is not enough.  A player has to have the proper approach at the plate.  He has to be willing to get a hit when a hit is needed.  Walks are nice, but sometimes the situation calls for a hit rather than a walk. 

I also want to say that a good OBP has to be coupled with good RBI and run numbers.  You can’t simply dismiss these stats because they are “team dependent.”  Over the course of time, these things even out.  After a player is around for a few years, they get the opportunity to score runs and drive in runs.  RBI and runs are still valuable and important statistics.  They should not be cast away to the island of old time, out-dated stats.

OBP is part of the process, it’s not the result.  The desired result is winning ball games.  OBP is just one of many factors that can lead to the result.

That’s all I’m saying.  And that’s how I’m going to end this post.