Your Favorite Offensive Stat

I think of all the offensive stats, my son(and myself) is probably the most proud of his low strikeout total.  9 total strikeouts at the plate last spring/summer/fall in 62 games playing HS varsity, 16U in the summer and 17U/18U in the fall.

That is seriously impressive

How many hard hit balls did I have.  Do not care about numbers, average, etc.  Focus on hitting the ball hard for the team.  Simple!

What level of play?

All levels! 

To much pressure placed especially on kids by parents keeping track of average, hits, HR's, etc.  If you focus on just hitting it hard you will get your share that fall in.

Lets say any level of college or pro ball, JH. Is there a single stat that is the first thing you might look at, just to get things started in analysis?

On base percentage and runs scored.

My favorite when my kids are pitching is the unproductive out but that wasn't your question.

OBP and runs scored just as Sdlefty suggested. 

OBP & RBI...

OBP here as well.....love having players that get on base!

Quality at bats, because I know that if I have some good at bats and hit the ball hard, the hits will follow.

I'm with Sdlefty, I would say that Quality At Bat is the most important. As Steve Springer says "get inside the ball and hit it hard somewhere, the rest you have no control over"

As far as strike out rate this can be very deceiving, if it was a QAB, then yes, but if it is a weak grounder and an unproductive out then no. 

My son has a very low strike out rate (college - 10%) and the coaches are suggesting that he takes a few more aggressive swings "some times" and accepts a few more strikeouts, he may get a few extra base hits as a result. He is a big strong middle of order hitter so his approach may be different than a top of the order get-on-base player.

There are some new advanced statistics that I am not aware of and I am sure statsfornats will pop in here with. 

I can’t believe some of you folks! After all the grief I’ve taken by simply mentioning the word “stats”, yet someone comes who has made 10 posts, has no interest other than using the board as a source to improve his product to make $$$$, and people are fawning all over each other to participate in a discussion most have said was irrelevant.

Have you looked at his web site? The hassle-free way to compute team stats and promote players to recruiters.

I like hassle free, but promoting players to recruiters using stats? I’m pretty sure this board has stated over and over again that recruiters don’t care about stats.

Sorry  Frozenropes, I’ve been bitten on this before, so if you want anything from me, there has to be a quid pro quo.

In pro ball there is a stat called wRC+, which stands for Weighted Runs Created. It is an all-encompassing stat that normalizes both the values of each particular occurrence at the plate and includes park factors as well. In the public sector, I believe this is the most accurate statistic to get the best gauge of a player's overall contribution.

wRC+ is based off of wOBA, or "Weighted On-Base Average." I would explain it here but truthfully, I would not be able to do a better job than this: http://www.fangraphs.com/library/offense/woba/

wRC+ is simply a normalized version of wOBA, in order to set the results to league average. So, a 100 wRC+ is a league average hitter, a 95 wRC+ is five percent below league average, a 105 wRC+ is 5 percent above league average, etc. This allows us not only to compare players to each other in the same season (I.e.: The leaders in 2013 were Miguel Cabrera, at 192 wRC+ and Mike Trout, at 176 wRC+), but in different eras as well. It takes into account the fact that the run scoring environment is different year-to-year, and normalizes the statistic to show how the player compares against his competition. Here is a list of the wRC+ leaders all-time: http://www.fangraphs.com/leade...yers=0&sort=17,d 

There is a similar statistic used at Baseball Prospectus called TAv (Total Average), which also takes into account situational hitting. It is, in my opinion, very similar to wRC+, and is set to a scale similar to that of Batting Average (I.e.: .260 is generally around average). I prefer wRC+ simply because I like the format of comparing based on percentages above or below the mean, but TAv's use of situational hitting differs from the formula in wRC+, which intrigues me as well.

To follow up on previously suggested figures, OBP is a bit deceiving because it considers all times on base equal. In 2013, Miguel Cabrera and Joey Votto were #1 and #2 in OBP in MLB, but Cabrera had a SLG more than 150 points higher than Votto. Cabrera hit extra base hits much more frequently, and therefore his times on-base were more valuable than Votto's. 

Runs scored and RBI mean absolutely nothing when analyzing individual performance. Both of these statistics rely on the performance of teammates and therefore, in my opinion, are not individual stats. I don't take these stats into consideration when doing player analysis. There are other ways to analyze a player's performance within the game that are in this realm of situations, such as how he performs with RISP and his base running capabilities. But I would HIGHLY recommend that folks do not analyze runs scored or RBI as individual performance measures.

Most teams have analytical departments with a lot more access to a lot more data than that in the public sector, and therefore have proprietary algorithms to accomplish many of the same points of analysis. The above is a reflection of what is available publicly.

I like OBA, though I really like what Josh's is but have either no way tocalculate that for HS / summer ball or I am just incapable (which is probably more the case )

The difficult part of calculating such figures for amateur levels is the discrepancy of talent. It's certainly possible to do so with access to enough data, but I would question the accuracy of such measures due to the volatility of level of competition. That could be a great research study, though, and one I would absolutely love to read.

Yeah, certainly have seen the competition level all over the place. more so in HS than travel, simply because his summer team plays a a certain level (highest torunaments for Ohio but not National high level tournaments). so compettition is relatively level.

BTW, congrats on your new job with Arizona

Oh darn, so you'll be sitting this one out?

Stats, most of us enjoy stats at some level and, regardless of the OP's intent, welcome discussion on the topic.  I believe the grief you get is usually because of  the when and how.

Regarding the OP...

I, too, like hard hit balls for youth and OBP for higher levels.   

Originally Posted by cabbagedad:…I believe the grief you get is usually because of  the when and how.

But that doesn’t mean always, which means there’s something else going on as well.

Regarding the OP...

I, too, like hard hit balls for youth…

Do you have the universal definition for a hard hit ball? I’d sure like to see it. And I’d sure like an example of any metric you’ve developed, and how you use it as a coach to make player decisions.