Baseball Math Nerds, Please Save Us From the Abomination That Is OPS

The New York Yankees’ Aaron Judge is having one of the greatest hitting seasons of all time. Toss out any hitting stat you want and he’s at or near the top of the list with the titans of the sport. There is a wealth of data out there indicating that both he and Juan Soto are authoring historic seasons for the Evil Empire, and we don’t need to use the worst statistic in sports to tell it.

Fellow baseball nerds, I’m begging you, please stop citing OPS like it’s a stat that means anything. I see it everywhere now and it makes me want to scream.

Lol https://t.co/V1kw1QrVlp pic.twitter.com/sCnH4M1GG1

— Action Network (@ActionNetworkHQ) August 22, 2024

OPS stands for “on base percentage plus slugging percentage,” as it simply just adds those two percentages together and calls itself important. Because slugging percentages are inherently higher than on base percentages, OPS will always favor hitters who hit for power over those who get on base.

Hitting for power does generally do more to win baseball games than getting on base does (as I wrote about in my piece last week how MLB is trying to change the rules to address some boring proven winning strategies), so I genuinely do not know what OPS tries to communicate because its components, slugging and on-base, each describe different skills for a baseball player and are perfectly fine to use on their own.

But that’s not even the worst of it, as OPS is a fake number. It’s not real. It’s an affront to the very concept of mathematics.

Slugging percentage is calculated by putting the number of singles, doubles, triples and home runs each multiplied by one, two, three and four respectively in the numerator, and at bats in the denominator. An at bat does not include events like walks or hit-by-pitches.

On base percentage is calculated by putting the number of times a hitter reaches base via walks, hits, and hit-by-pitches in the numerator, while plate appearances are in the denominator.

So for example, if a hitter goes 2 for 3 with a single, a double, and a walk, they will be credited with three at bats, but four plate appearances.

You can’t add those fractions together without a common denominator first! I can hear my elementary school teachers weeping in pain as baseball rejects the basic lessons we all learned just as we were ditching our diapers.

For a sport centered around spreadsheets, I do not know why we still put up with this bullshit in 2024. In the decades since the advent of Moneyball, baseball has created stats like wOBA and wRC+ and all sorts of other far more informative metrics that wouldn’t fail a 3rd grade math test like OPS would. The advent of measuring the game in feet and miles per hour in recent years has created even more straightforward opportunities to provide descriptive measures, so why are we still subjecting ourselves to the tyranny of bad information in a sport where there is clearly too much information these days? Baseball math nerds, I’m begging you, someone needs to get rid of this mathematical abomination once and for all.