Having gone through the data on WHIPs below 1.00 (see that thread in this forum) the other day, on frazzman80's suggestion I will get a start on the equivalent elite seasons by batters. 

OPS, as frazzman80 suggests is probably the most relevant stat, though the fact it does not weigh in either direction the relative importance of OBP or SLG means that we should probably break it down. I also want to look at home runs both in raw numbers and as HR/AB. And at least seeing how well RBI are correlated with OPS or SLG might be interesting, at least for high performance batters, just to play round with a stat that is now out of fashion, but after all, as Bill James said of W-L being the only stat directly correlated with winning and losing, RBI is the only one directly correlated with driving in runs. 

Let's start with OBP. When I put in what I would consider the clear cutoff for a very good to great season - .400 OBP, I found that no matter what era of more than five years I tried, I got more than 500 entries, and since the WIS DC gives us only a maximum of 500 listings that means that we would not be able to know exactly how common this was. 

So I am going to have to break it up into 10 year increments, and it may be that we need to break it up even into smaller units than decades. But since we do see the period 2006-2015 as having its own characteristics (post-steroid era) let's start there and work backward this time. 

From 2006-2015 there have been 91 players with seasons in which they had an On-Base-Percentage of .400 or higher, 9.1 a year. The highest OBP in this past decade has been .470 by Chipper Jones in 2008. 

Breaking it down by season, these .400 OBP seasons were distributed as follows: 

2006 - 17 
2007 - 18
2008 - 11
2009 - 13
2010 -  7
2011 -  6
2012 -  3
2013 -  7
2014 -  3
2015 -  6

It is dinner time in Italy, so the analysis of this data will wait for an hour, but clearly 2010 is an important turning point here. 

Here are the statistics for batting PER GAME since 1992: 

As we see, in 2010, home runs per game fell below 1.00 for the first time since 1993  OBP fell below .330 for the first time since 1991 when it was .325 and HR/game was 0.80. 

So my hypothesis is that OBP, contrary to much of the baseball wisdom of the past 10-15 years is simply not an independent variable - it is not a cause, and cannot simply be improved by baseball strategy Sabermetrics or no sabermetrics. OBP is a dependent variable - an effect, not a cause, and it is an effect of the likelihood of home runs being hit. 

The more likely home runs are, the higher OBP. So the idea that OBP is the key to winning, because getting people on base is how you score runs, is actually putting the cart before the horse. The horse is home runs. Recall that looking at WHIPs below 1.00, we found that in recent years low WHIPs have been more common. This statistic - WHIP is of course the pitching mirror-image of OBP. 


But we have some questions to ask: if I am right, why did WHIPs below 1.00 become more common even in the steroid era (though even more common now since that era has ended)?

Yet if we were right to surmise from the data that the modern use of relievers is the key to low WHIPs, were the use of steroids the batters' answer to that (from their point of view) problem? If so, it would seem to have worked in part, since both home runs per game and OBP went up for a while. 

But notice something else: home runs per game went UP suddenly in 2015 - but it was above 1.00 in 2012 as well. So the pattern is so far not entirely clear or conclusive. 

Here are ALL the MLB seasons EVER in which home runs per game were higher than 1.00: 

19 seasons in all, ever out of the 130 seasons of the WIS database had HR/Game averages above 1.00. Only 1987 and, technically 1994, are before the strike of 1994. The rest are solidly in the steroid era except for 2012 and 2015. And who is to say for sure about those two? 

Anyway, now the question is how closely correlated these seasons are with high average OBP seasons in baseball, after which we will resume our look at high quality OBP seasons' frequency and then move on to OPS. 


The highest OBP ever MLB wide was in 1894 - .379, followed by 1895 at .361. Then come 1930, 1893, 1925, 1896, 1897, 1929, 1936, 1922. The highest HR/Game average in any of the top ten was in 1930 when there were an anemic, by our standards, 0.63 HR/game - so what was perceived as a mega-hitters' season was not a home run season by modern standards. None of the top OBP seasons were.   But ALL the seasons I just mentioned as having the highest OBP were in the top ten of highest batting average seasons ever. 1894 is at the top of that list too, with batters averaging .309, the only .300 season overall in history, and 1895 right behind at .296, tied with 1930. 

So, we see that the historical focus of baseball on batting average turns out NOT to have been irrational - up to the recent era OBP was driven by batting average, with most of the OBP stat taken up with BA, not with a heavy presence of walks. It is ONLY since HRs became really common that walks became more common and OBP had less of a correlation with BA. 

So recent Sabermetrics with its new strategic emphases has NOT discovered anything new, it has merely found that the facts themselves have changed - OBP is less dependent on BA than it was historically because now it is more dependent on HR/Game.  The seasons 1999 and 2000 are numbers 17 and 18 on the list of all-time highest league OBPs, after the big Babe Ruth years of 1926 and 1927, but all the seasons ahead of 1999 and 2000 on that list, including the Ruth seasons, had HR/game numbers that look pathetic today. 

So, it turns out that emphasizing batting average was MORE productive of getting on base and having high OBP than either the emphasis on OBP that we have today or the high HR/game numbers of recent decades. 

The highest  24 seasons for runs per game totals in baseball history ALL come from the 19th century ! With one exception: 1930. And then come four more seasons: 1900, 1929, 1936 and 1878 before we get to number 29 the year 2000 in which 5.14 runs per game were scored/allowed. The year 1999 comes in at number 33 on the list, at 5.08. 

The stats listed above are from the web page: http://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/MLB/bat.shtml


Now, I want to finally get back to my WIS database search on OBP seasons above .400, but let's summarize some of our extraordinary findings so far: 

1. OBP seems to go up and down with HR/Game in the contemporary era
2. OBP in other words is NOT a winning strategy but an effect - a result of how much pitchers are worried about HRs. 
3. But the most effective way historically ever of getting OBP to be high, AND of scoring runs, is NOT concentrating on OBP as we do today, nor even HRs, but high batting average. 
4. High batting averages historically resulted in the highest ever OBP averages league wide, and the highest run totals. So the best way to score runs is not focusing on OBP per se/walks, nor Home Runs, but high batting averages. 
5. But the recent changes in use of relief pitchers has sent OBP down, when combined with the cracking down on HRs resulting from steroids.  Are higher batting averages impossible given the use of relievers, who, by forcing batters to see a pitcher only for the first time in late innings and only maybe twice around for starters ? If so, and if HRs stay down, NO focus on OBP is going to change that, because OBP does not cause anything - in and of itself it is NOT the way you score runs, it is an indicator of the likelihood of scoring runs resulting from people getting on base through high batting averages (and therefore high OBP) or from home runs themselves or the fear of home runs leading to more walks and high OBP. 


Here are the LOWEST batting average seasons ever in baseball history, to the highest: 

The year 2014 is number 27 on this list, 2013 number 31 and 2015 number 37 among the lowest ever averages. But looking at the other years at the top of the list of the bottom of batting averages I see that the seasons are all over the place. No clear pattern emerging. 

So, now back to the frequency of OBPs over .400. 

I should have noted that in doing this search I kept to players with at least 500 PA, since lower PA than that gives a small sample size and does not really tell us about season-long performance. So 500 is my minimum here. 

Here is where we were, having looked at the past ten years of baseball: 

From 2006-2015 there have been 91 players with seasons in which they had an On-Base-Percentage of .400 or higher, 9.1 a year. The highest OBP in this past decade has been .470 by Chipper Jones in 2008. 

Breaking it down by season, these .400 OBP seasons were distributed as follows: 

2006 - 17 
2007 - 18
2008 - 11
2009 - 13
2010 -  7
2011 -  6
2012 -  3
2013 -  7
2014 -  3
2015 -  6

Now, in the preceding decade of 1996-2005, there were no fewer than 202 players with seasons in which they had at least 500 PA and at least a .400 or higher OBP, double the number of the decade starting in 2006 and ending last season. 

Here is the breakdown: 

1996 - 25
1997 - 20
1998 - 20
1999 - 31
2000 - 31
2001 - 18
2002 - 20
2003 - 16
2004 - 12 - none of them on the World Champion Red Sox - keep this in mind as we analyze what these numbers tell us below.
2005 - 11

NOW, someone please tell me how in the world we can claim that Billy Beane and Sabermetrics came along around 2001-2002-2003 and changed baseball leading to a new emphasis on OBP that has made such a big difference as a key to run scoring, and, as the movie and book "Moneyball" claim, that strategy once adopted by the Boston Red Sox finally broke the curse of the Bambino etc. if, as we see from these numbers and those discussed above: 

1. The number of players having high OBP peaked BEFORE moneyball, in  1999-2000-2001, AND when 2003-4 saw a significant drop in such high OBPs, and when the team that supposedly won by embracing this strategy did not have even one of the over .400 OBP players the year they won the Series? 
2. When, as we have seen, OBP was higher in previous eras of baseball when batting average, not OBP was emphasized
3. When, as we have seen, high OBPs have happened more frequently when a lot of HRs were being hit during the steroid era. 

In other words, the whole OBP-revolution has been smoke and mirrors, and it is not even clear that OBP per se should be emphasized more than batting average after all except that batting averages are likely to be low these days because of the high number of below 1.00 WHIPs that are the result of the use of relievers in a novel way the past few years. 

but anyway, we now have two decades to compare: 

number of players with minimum 500 PA and OBP of .400 or higher: 



1996-2005 - 202
2006-2015 -  91

From 1986-1995 there 85 players that had OBPs over .400 with at least 500 PA. 

Only five in 1986 -  Raines, Boggs, Brett, Keith Hernandez and Phil Bradley. All due respect to Bradley, we are mainly talking here about elite players to arrive at .400 OBP in 1986. More like the historical experience of WHIPs under 1.00. Not an everyday occurrence as in the period 1996-2005, since if the 1986 rate were to hold up we would have only 50 per decade. 

There were 12 in 1987, but only three in all of 1988 - two on the Red Sox, Boggs and Greenwell. So the Red Sox played more "Moneyball" in 1988 than in 2004. There were 7 in 1989 (Rickey Henderson who was traded is listed twice in the WIS database that year). There were six players with OBP over .400 with a minimum of 500 PA in 1990 and it worth listing their names: Barry Bonds, Rickey Henderson, Fred McGriff, Eddie Murray, Lenny Dysktra, Dave Magadan. 

In 1991 the seven players with such seasons were Willie Randolph, Wade Boggs, Barry Bonds, Edgar Martinez, Frank Thomas, Julio Franco and Brett Butler. 

Butler did it again in 1992, along with John Kruk and Danny Tartabull. Otherwise the players that year with such numbers are from the baseball elite: Barry Bonds, Rickey Henderson, Frank Thomas, Roberto Alomar, Edgar Martinez, 8 in all. 

1993 - 17 players did it. So we have a cutoff date now most likely - 17 in 1993 compared to single digit numbers for every year from 1988 through 1992. The year 1987 stands out for offense as we have seen looking at other stats from baseball-reference above. So we will see in a moment how typical it was of its own era. But we have already seen that its 12 such player-seasons was bookended by just 5 in 1986 and only 3 in 1988. 


The 1994 number, a strike-shortened season, is  just 6. The 1995 number brings that up  to 14. 

So, we have now 

1986-1995 - 85 
1996-2005 - 202
2006-2016 - 91

In 1976 to 1985 there were 50 players with at least 500 PA in a season and OBP of .400 or higher. 

In 1976 there were five and three of them: Morgan, Rose and Griffey Sr. were on the Reds, the other two were Bill Madlock and Hal McRae. 

1977  - 9 
1978 - 3 (Jeff Burroughs, Rod Carew, Ken Singleton)
1979 - 10
1980- 5
1981 - 1 (Dwight Evans)
1982 - 2 (Evans again and MIke Schmidt)
1983 - 3 (Rod Carew, Wade Boggs, and Rickey Henderson)
1984 - 5
1985 - 7

So: 

1976-1985 - 50
1986-1995 - 85
1996-2005 - 202
2006-2015 - 91

Italyprof, based on your analysis, and assuming that correlation implies causation (which is completely ridiculous, as you well know), how are we to infer that home runs promote better OBP, rather than better OBP resulting in greater HR totals?

Higher OBP results in more plate appearances, which results in more chances to hit home runs.  If all you're looking at is raw HR totals, that matters.  Pitchers also tend to be less effective, on average, with runners on base.

From 1966 to 1975 there were 67 players with seasons in which with at least 500 PA they had OBP of .400 or higher. 

1966 - 3 - Frank Robinson, Joe Morgan and Ron Santo
1967 - 6 (worth naming them just for the names): Frank Robinson, Dick Allen, Roberto Clemente, Al Kaline, Harmon Killebrew and of course Carl Yastrzemski. 
1968 - 1 Carl Yastrzemski
1969 - 13
1970 - 11
1971 - 8
1972 - 3 (Joe Morgan, Dick Allen and Carlos May)
1973 - 8
1974 - 4 (Rod Carew, Willie Stargell, Carl Yastrzemski and Joe Morgan) 
1975 - 9

1966-1975 -67
1976-1985-50
1986-1995 - 85
1996-2005 - 202
2006-2015 -   91

There were 56 players with seasons in which they had at least 500 PA and had OBPs of .400 or over between 1956 and 1965:

1956 - 10
1957 - 7 (Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Stan Musial, Minnie Minoso, Nellie Fox, Gene Woodling)
1958 - 8
1959 - 7
1960 - 5
1961 - 9  (NOT Roger Maris, who batted ahead of Mickey Mantle most of the season)
1962 -  6
1963 - 2  - Carl Yastrzemski and someone named Albie Pearson (who?)
1964 - 2 Mickey Mantle and Bob Allison
1965 - zero !


Decade by decade: 

1956-65 - 56
1966-1975 -67
1976-1985-50
1986-1995 - 85
1996-2005 - 202
2006-2015 -   91

The 2004 Red Sox led the league in OBP and runs, 5 players on that team had 500+ PA and .380+ OBP.

But the decade preceding 1956-65, the years from 1946-55 had - hold onto your hats (which we are wearing since it is January and we are in the 40s and 50s before JFK at his inaugural and Bob Dylan on the cover of his "Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" album killed the hat industry for men in the US in a single year - hold onto your hats because from 1946 to 1955 there were 118 players that had 500 PA in a season and .400 or higher OBP !

1946: 7 - Ted Williams had .497 OBP that year !
1947 - 12
1948 - 10 - Ted Williams had another .497 OBP year !
1949 - 18
1950 - 20
1951 - 15
1952 - suddenly we are all the way down to 3 - Jackie Robinson, Stan Musial and someone named Ferris Fain. 
1953 - 11
1954 - 14
1955 -  8

Folks, I have to say that this time I am pretty stumped. I have to meditate on this data to try to make sense of it. Why do we have such high numbers for this 10-year period of players with .400 or better OBP and why does that number fall to nothing in 1952 (Ted Williams fighting in Korea only counts once)? Any good theories out there will be most welcome. hmm.

Posted by ncmusician_7 on 1/10/2016 6:14:00 PM (view original):
The 2004 Red Sox led the league in OBP and runs, 5 players on that team had 500+ PA and .380+ OBP.

Fair enough. But they also led the league in batting average, and were second to the Yankees in walks in the AL. The SF Giants had a team OBP just .003 lower than the Red Sox, and had more walks. 

The 1998 Yankees' OBP was .364, four points higher than the 2004 Red Sox. So my point was not that OBP was not important to the Red Sox' success, nor that they were not a great team, but that there is no basis for thinking that either they or the Athletics, revolutionized baseball thinking and strategy in those years, nor that OBP is a factor independent of other more important factors that result in high OBP  - the 1998 Yankees were second only by one point to Texas for team batting average for example. 

I am sure that teams that are successful always have better OBP all other things being equal than those that are not successful, but the question is whether baseball has really learned some amazing new thing that it was just to crotchety and conservative to understand for more than a century, or if, as with so many things in our thinking in the past few years and decades, we are blindly following a fad that has less basis than we are led to believe.