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Batting Stats Glossary

General Recommendations

The player, team and league statlines are now dramatically different than when the site first launched, so a comprehensive list of the stats would take far longer and would likely be much less useful than previously. So we have implemented a tooltip solution that shows you a description of the statistic when you hold your mouse over the header abbreviation for the stat. You can try it below.
We also have implemented a sorting feature. When the header abbreviation is red (and this is true of all red text), you can click the header to sort by that column. In many cases the table contains partial season (for a traded player) and full season data, their full season summary. When this is the case, we hide the partial seasons in the sorted results, and provide another tooltip to bring the partial seasons back. Occasionally, there is a select box toggle that allows you to hide or show players who may not have met some minimum qualification such as 502 PA's for the batting title. This only comes into play when sorting on ratio stats like on-base percentage, but not counting stats like home runs.
The CSV and PRE tooltips provide a means to get comma-separated values suitable for loading into excel and pre-formatted text that might work better in things like message boards and e-mails.
In some cases, a player's career may span seasons for which a stat like strikeouts or sacrifice flies are not available and seasons for which they are. In those cases we attempt to mark the statistic as shown 162. This means that this career total does not include all seasons the player played and therefore we do not know the exact number.
For the most common stats found in our leaderboards, we denote league leading stats with bold text and major league leading totals are further marked with italics. For career statistics, all-time leaders are marked with **'s and active leaders with italics.
When a stat is unavailable its season entry should be blank, rather than zero. This may not always be the case, but it is what we've tried to do.

Adjusted OPS+

This value is calculated differently from the Total Baseball PRO+ statistic. I chose OPS+ to make this difference more clear. PRO+ as best I can tell is
OPS+ = PRO+ = 100 * ( OBP/lgOBP + SLG/lgSLG - 1)/BPF
Where lgOBP and lgSLG are the slugging and on-base percentage of a league-average player, and BPF is the batting park factor. This takes into account the difference in runs scored in a team's home and road games, so it doesn't depend on how good an offense or defense a team has.
My method is slightly more complicated, but I think it is more correct. The BPF is set up for runs and the way it is implemented in PRO+ applies it to something other than runs.
    My method
  1. Compute the runs created for the league with pitchers removed (basic form) RC = (H + BB + HBP)*(TB)/(AB + BB + HBP + SF)
  2. Adjust this by the park factor RC' = RC*BPF
  3. Assume that if hits increase in a park, that BB, HBP, TB increase at the some proportion.
  4. Assume that Outs = AB - H (more or less) do not change at all as outs are finite.
  5. Compute the number of H, BB, HBP, TB needed to produce RC', involves the quadratic formula. The idea for this came from the Willie Davis player comment in the Bill James New Historical Baseball Abstract. I think some others, including Clay Davenport have done some similar things.
  6. Using these adjusted values compute what the league average player would have hit lgOBP*, lgSLG* in a park.
  7. Take OPS+ = 100 * (OBP/lgOBP* + SLG/lgSLG* - 1)
  8. Note, in my database, I don't store lgSLG, but store lgTB and similarly for lgOBP and lg(Times on Base), this makes calculation of career OPS+ much easier.

Career "High"

Below that is the career high for the player in each category. It is not their best season, but the best (highest/sometimes lowest) from all the categories. You can quickly see what Barry Bonds's career highs in strikeouts were along with walks, home runs, etc. I required the qualifying number of plate appearances in a season to be considered for the career best BA, SLG and OBP entries to be 1.55/team game. If I didn't do this you would end up with some players having a 1 hit in 2 at bats cup of coffee as their career best batting average.

162 Game Average

This is an attempt to condense each batter's career into a single season's worth of stats. With batters this is easy. Just take their career games played and divide by 162 and then divide their career totals by that factor.
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