What Is Ops In Baseball Statistics?
Contents
In baseball, “ops” is a statistical measure that combines a player’s on-base percentage and slugging percentage. It’s a popular metric for evaluating hitters, and it can be used to compare players across different eras.
OPS
OPS is a baseball statistic that combines a player’s on-base percentage and slugging percentage. The acronym stands for “on-base plus slugging,” and it is used to measure a player’s overall offensive production. OPS is typically used to measure a player’s effectiveness as a hitter, but it can also be used to measure a player’s effectiveness as a baserunner and fielder.
What is it?
In baseball, OPS is a statistical measure of a batter’s on-base percentage and slugging percentage. The combination of the two percentages gives a more accurate representation of a player’s overall offensive production than either one alone.
Traditionally, a player’s on-base percentage was seen as a better measure of his ability to get on base, while his slugging percentage was seen as a better measure of his power. However, recent studies have shown that OPS is actually a better predictor of runs scored than either on-base percentage or slugging percentage alone.
There are different ways to calculate OPS, but the most common version is simply OPS = OBP + SLG.
What is it used for?
Ops is a baseball statistic that stands for on-base percentage plus slugging percentage. It attempts to measure a player’s ability to get on base and hit for power. The higher the ops, the better the hitter is considered to be.
There are a few different ways to calculate ops. The most common way is to simply add a player’s on-base percentage and slugging percentage together. This gives you their raw ops total.
However, some people prefer to adjust for the league average. To do this, you would take a player’s ops and subtract the league average ops from it. This gives you the player’s ops+ (pronounced “ops plus”).
For example, let’s say that the league average ops is .750 and a certain player has an ops of .800. Their ops+ would be calculated like this:
(.800 – .750) = .050
This means that this player is 50 points above average in terms of their ability to get on base and hit for power.
How to calculate OPS
OPS is a baseball metric that stands for on-base plus slugging. It is used to measure a player’s overall offensive ability. The higher the OPS, the better the player is at getting on base and hitting for power. OPS can be calculated by adding a player’s on-base percentage and their slugging percentage.
On-base percentage (OBP)
On-base percentage (OBP) is a statistic that measures how often a batter reaches first base. It is calculated by dividing the number of hits by the number of at-bats and adding walks. The higher the on-base percentage, the more times a batter gets on base and the better he is at getting on base. A good on-base percentage is important for a hitter because it means he is more likely to score runs.
To calculate OPS, you simply add a player’s OBP to his slugging percentage. So, if a player has an OBP of .350 and a slugging percentage of .450, his OPS would be .800. The league average OPS for hitters in 2019 was .755, so any player with an OPS above that is considered to be above average.
OPS is one of the most important statistics in baseball because it measures a player’s ability to get on base and hit for power. It is used to compare hitters from different eras and different positions. The best way to use OPS is to compare it to other players who play the same position and who have similar career statistics.
Slugging percentage (SLG)
SLG is one of the three main statistics used to measure a batter’s productivity at the plate, along with batting average (AVG) and on-base percentage (OBP). It’s calculated by dividing the total number of bases a player accumulates (including home runs) by his total number of at-bats. Unlike AVG and OBP, which each use hits as their denominator, SLG uses at-bats because it considers all the ways a batter can reach safely, including walks and hit-by-pitches.
For example, let’s say that in 50 at-bats, a batter has 15 hits (three of which are home runs), five walks and two hit-by-pitches. His total number of bases would be 25 (15 hits + five walks + two hit-by-pitches), and his slugging percentage would be .500 ((15+5+2)/50).
A player’s SLG is affected not only by how often he gets hits, but also by how often he hits for extra bases. A player with a high SLG is typically someone who hits for both power and average. Players with low SLGs generally don’t hit for much power; they might have high batting averages, but they don’t hit many balls over the fence.
OPS = OBP + SLG
OPS, or On-Base Plus Slugging, is a baseball statistic that combines a player’s on-base percentage and their slugging percentage. OPS essentially measures how well a player can get on base and hit for power.
The formula for OPS is simple: just add together a player’s on-base percentage and their slugging percentage. However, because on-base percentage and slugging percentage are both such important statistics in their own right, OPS is seen as an even more valuable metric.
In general, an OPS above 1.000 is considered to be very good, while an OPS below .700 is considered to be poor. However, these numbers will vary depending on the era and the specific league in which a player is playing. For example, in today’s game, an OPS of .900 might be seen as average, while in the 1980s, an OPS of .900 would have been considered to be very good.
There are a few different ways to calculate OPS. The most common method is to simply add together a player’s on-base percentage and their slugging percentage. However, there is also a weighting factor that can be applied to account for the fact that slugging percentage is more important than on-base percentage.
The formula for weighted OPS (wOPS) is as follows: wOPS = (1.8 * SLG) + (0.6 * OBP). As you can see, this formula puts more emphasis on slugging percentage than on-base percentage.
There are other variations of the formula as well, but these are the two most common ways to calculate OPS.
What is a good OPS?
OPS+ is a baseball metric that combines a player’s on-base percentage and slugging percentage. The intent of OPS+ is to correct for the effects of ballpark and era. It is scaled so that 100 is average and each point above or below is a percentage better or worse than the average player. An OPS+ of 110, for example, is 10% above average, while an OPS+ of 90 is 10% below average.
OPS leaders
In baseball, OPS is short for on-base plus slugging. It’s a simple statistic that combines two very important offensive measures: a player’s ability to get on base with their ability to hit for power.
The formula is simple: OPS = OBP + SLG. OBP is on-base percentage and SLG is slugging percentage.
For example, let’s say Player A has a batting average of .300, a home run percentage of 5%, and a walks per plate appearance rate of 10%. Their OBP would be .300 + (5% x .300) + (10% x .300) = .450.
Similarly, let’s say Player B has a batting average of .250, a home run percentage of 10%, and a walks per plate appearance rate of 5%. Their OBP would be .250 + (10% x .250) + (5% x .250) = .350.
Now let’s look at slugging percentage. Slugging percentage is simply the number of total bases divided by the number of at-bats. So, if Player A had 50 hits in 200 at-bats, their slugging percentage would be 50/200 = .250. If Player B had 60 hits in 200 at-bats, their slugging percentage would be 60/200 = .300.
Putting it all together, we get that Player A has an OPS of .450 + .250 = .700 and Player B has an OPS of .350 + .300 = 0.650. So even though Player B has a higher batting average and more home runs, their lower on-base percentage means that they are not as good at getting on base or hitting for power as Player A. Therefore, OPS is a good way to compare players who might have different strengths or weaknesses offensively.
OPS and Hall of Fame
OPS+ and Hall of Fame
One of the controversial parts of OPS+ is that it was not yet invented when most of the great hitters of the past century played. I have written before about how we should use OPS+ to judge hitters of the past, but some people are still hesitant to do so. After all, Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth didn’t have OPS+, so how can we use it to judge them?
The answer is that we can use OPS+ to judge them, but we have to be a little bit careful. The problem with using OPS+ for players who played before its invention is that we don’t know what their true baseline is. We know what their OPS was, but we don’t know how much better or worse they would have been if they had faced pitchers of different eras.
To judge players of the past using OPS+, we need to find a way to compare them to contemporary players. The best way to do this is to look at Hall of Fame voting. We can use the Hall of Fame vote as a proxy for how good a player was in their era.
Conclusion
From a statistical standpoint, OPS+ is a more accurate measure of a hitter’s contribution than batting average, because it considers not just how often a hitter gets a hit, but also how often he reaches base via walk or hit by pitch, and the relative value of extra-base hits. OPS+ also takes into account the fact that different Major League parks have different dimensions, which can inflate or deflate batting stats.