- In Wednesday game against Detroit the Cubs were just 1 for 15 (.067) with runners in scoring position (and that one hit still didn’t produce a run), but were 10 for 20 (.500) when there were no runners in scoring position.

- On the current road trip the Cubs are a total of 1 for 29 (.034) with runners in scoring position but are 27 for 73 (.370) with no runners in scoring position.

- The Cubs are currently hitting .223 as a team with runners in scoring position, dead last in all of baseball.

- The Current .223 mark is worse than any team has hit with runners in scoring position during a season in the past 5 years.

- The Cubs have 3 of the worst hitters with RISP of all regulars in the big leagues, Geovany Soto at .204, Mike Fontenot at .205 and Alfonso Soriano at .157

- Only one Cub (Kosuke Fukudome) has hit higher than .264 with runners in scoring position. And only 2 qualifying players are higher than .242 (Fukudome and Theriot).

- In the month of June the Cubs are hitting just .205 with runners in scoring position.

- The Cubs are hitting .207 so far this year on the road with runners in scoring position.

- This season the Cubs are hitting .259 with no outs, .237 with 1 out and .217 with 2 outs.

- Cubs are hitting .147 on the season with runners on 2nd and 3rd.

- The Cubs have hit 47 solo Home Runs, only 24 with runners on base and only 11 with RISP.

Yeah those numbers look bad, but I’m here to tell you they are a good thing.  I mean of course they aren’t a good thing looking back, but looking forward, if the Cubs can keep up their good all-around hitting, statistically the low average with runners in scoring position will even out.  It has been mostly proven by sabremetricians that batting average with runners in scoring position is an illusory stat, and if you give a ballplayer enough at-bats in those situations, they will eventually hit their normal average.  For instance, if the Cubs are hitting .247 overall as a team this year (which they are), given the course of the whole season, statistics have shown with studies of every other team in baseball history (with a few notable exceptions, of course), that the Cubs will likely hit .247 with runners in scoring position over the course of the season.

So fear not, Cubs fans.  If the Cubbies continue to hit well like they have been doing the last few weeks, eventually those hits will come with runners in scoring position.  Just to ensure everyone is making the connection, yes this is all a part of my belief that clutch hitting does not exist.  Although if it did exist, which it doesn’t, Aramis Ramirez coming back will definitely give the Cubbies a boost in that department.  The department of clutch-hitting that doesn’t exist I mean.

This year teams that walk zero or one time win about one third of their games. If they walk two to three times it jumps up to about 45 percent. If they walk four or five times they win about 57 percent of the time. And if they walk six times or more their winning percentage is .646.

On top of that, those numbers are not unique to this year.  According to the article those numbers have pretty much stayed consistent throughout the decades.  If a team walks 4-6 times, it is obvious that they will have a far greater chance to win.  What I find interesting is that a team that only walks once a game is going to be a loser 66% of the time.  I wonder how Dusty Baker would refute these statistical facts.  I don’t know if his earthy wisdom is going to persuade me out of this one.

Many of you probably subscribe to the theory that statistics can only tell part of the story and things like “clubhouse presence”, “clutch-hitting”, “RBIs”, and “ability to close out games in the 9th” are a crucial if not the most important factor in judging a player’s value (StevieY and all the other jocks are included in this category).  Although I joke that there is no such thing as clutch-hitting, I don’t believe that completely.  There is overwhelming evidence, however, that things like clutch-hitting do not even exist given a large enough sample size.

Whether you fall on the side of the jocks or the stat nerds, everyone can agree that the variables in baseball are limited enough to such things as defense and ballpark (both of which can be accounted for pretty easily).  Statistical analysis, therefore, is a great way of determining a player’s value, though obviously StevieY and others think it is less important than intelligent people like myself, Bill James, Bill Simmons, Rob Neyer, and the guys over at Baseball Prospectus.

Which brings me to basketball.  In the last few years, John Hollinger has spurred a mainstream effort to utilize statistics in basketball in a similar way to how they have been used in baseball.  The problem is basketball is a game of variables above all else.  As any statistician knows, the more variables there are, the harder it is to control for all of them in a statistical analysis.  Where baseball is limited to a one-on-one at-bat, every single play in basketball is affected by the other players around, the offensive philosophy, the defense, the pace, and many other factors.  Bill Simmons explained the problem with trying to use stats as a predominant factor in assessing value in basketball:

In my mind, basketball lends itself to the perfect blend of objectivity and subjectivity. Statistics help only so much; we still have to interpret what we see. Take Jason Kidd. Why has he suddenly become a deadly three-point shooter at his advanced age? Because he isn’t carrying an offense or taking contested shots with the shot clock winding down like he had to in Jersey, that’s why. In Dallas, all he has to do is distribute the ball and shoot … when he’s open. Now look at poor Dwyane Wade. He misses 70% of his threes — the only blemish on his MVP résumé — because his teammates stink, which means he has to hoist one or two contested, beat-the-clock bombs each game.

While the recent use of statistics by teams such as the Rockets and players like Shane Battier, along with John Hollinger’s PER and others, have pushed the use of stats to the forefront of basketball analysis, we have to be careful not to rely on those stats like we do (and should do!) in baseball.

The point here is that as much as I have utilized statistics to illustrate players values and how good teams are in my coverage of the Bulls and the NBA (using stats ranging from points per game and fg% to +/- and PER), I never truly believed those statistics could be used exclusive of other types of analysis to determine a player’s value.  In the upcoming baseball season, that will change drastically.  Statistics like walks and slugging %, as well as almost completely spurning things like RBIs and steals (useless and harmful respectively) are extremely important to proving what a player brings to the team.  I get excited as much as anyone about a walk-off homerun. a crucial late-season save, or a great clubhouse presence (DeRosa’s value in the clubhouse cannot be downplayed) but those kinds of things alone are not determinative of how good a player is over the course of a season (in my opinion).

Oh and StevieY and you other jocks that hate statistics?  Stop saying us stat geeks are ruining the game and making it less fun.  Just because we would rather value a stat like OPS and want our players to draw walks instead of attempt steals (which, by the way, means we want our team to win since it is PROVEN that walking more and stealing less leads to more runs and thus more wins), doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy a hot dog and a beer at Wrigley Field while watching Aramis Ramirez hit a bomb in the bottom of the 9th to win the game.