Sports Reference Blog

2013 Spring Training Stats W/ Quality of Opposition Measure

Posted by sean on February 26, 2013

We've never included Spring Training stats on the site before, but decided to add our own take this year, so we now have spring training stats on the player and team pages and on a league register page, so you can see every player in camp on one page.

One hard thing about spring training is that you've got a very wide variety of players in camp. Veteran major leaguers, AAA, AA, and even low-A ball players. A player hitting .400/.500/.600 against A-ball competition is a lot different than one who does that against MLBers (though truth be told the sample sizes are so small as to not tell us much definitively). To give you a feel for the level of competition we've provided an OppQual column that is 1-10. Each opponent for each PA for that batter or pitcher is graded between 1 and 10 based on the level or average level (weighted by IP or PA) they played at last year.

  • 10 - MLB
  • 8 - AAA
  • 7 - AA
  • 5 - High A (Cali or Carolina)
  • 4 - Full-Season A (Midwest and SALLY)
  • 1.5 to 3 - Rookie or Short-season
  • 1 - for pitchers if the opposing batter is a pitcher

So a player over 9 is facing mostly MLB guys while someone under 9 is facing mostly minor leaguers. Players like John Lackey in 2012 or Yu Darvish in 2011 who did not play in an MLB affiliated league are simply excluded from the rating.

Player Pages - Spring Training Stats appear at the top of major and minor league player pages.

Team Stats: 2013 Atlanta Braves Spring Training, these are all linked from the site front page.

League-wide Stats: Batting Register and Pitching Register. These tables are sortable, so you can look up current leaders if you like.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2013 at 2:48 pm and is filed under Advanced Stats, Announcement, Baseball-Reference.com. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

10 Responses to “2013 Spring Training Stats W/ Quality of Opposition Measure”

  1. Cliff Otto Says: February 26th, 2013 at 7:17 pm

    And to think I almost went through some box scores today to determine just this. Thank you.

  2. John Northey Says: February 27th, 2013 at 7:12 am

    Woohoo! Always fun to look at spring stats, just for the freak show aspect of it. Any chance of historical spring stats? Was looking at MLB and they have it back to 2006 but haven't found any sources further back. Fun to see some old names I forgot about, and to trigger memories of some old springs where a prospect seemed super-human just to never get a ML chance or the big oddities like Tom Selleck getting an at bat for the Tigers. Lifetime spring stats would be even funnier - seeing stars who hit like bums or some kid who tore it up spring after spring but never hit 200 in the majors. Just adds to the stories of spring and the magic of it.

  3. art gold Says: February 28th, 2013 at 9:47 am

    Thanks for this information, that is just a great idea!!! It will be interesting to see how the stats match the decisions about which marginal players the teams end up retaining at the start of the season.

  4. Jack Zerby Says: February 28th, 2013 at 4:40 pm

    Thanks, Sean and B-R! What a great resource for fantasy "scouting."

  5. NatsLady Says: March 1st, 2013 at 1:19 pm

    This is a great feature. I'm presently grading all the candidates for Nats lefty specialist, and I've added it to my evaluation. Thanks so much!

    Lefties for hire

    http://ladyandthenats.blogspot.com/2013/02/lefties-for-hire-as-of-2282013.html …

  6. Cool Stat | The Yellow Seats Says: March 2nd, 2013 at 7:21 am

    [...] But over at baseball-reference.com (an awesome site if you’ve never been) they have a new stat that measures the quality of the opposition a player has seen for each plate appearance. This way you can tell if the 7 home runs Freddy Galvis hits in spring [...]

  7. NatsLady Says: March 2nd, 2013 at 9:13 am

    On a different topic, is there any way from the play index to tell which base was stolen? I'm trying to track double-steals. So far my procedure is

    (1) Search for games with >= 2 SB
    (2) Look at box score to see if a player stole 3B or home vs. the same pitcher/catcher combo as another player
    (3) Look at the play log to see if it was on the same play.

    The Padres for 2013 took me almost 3 hours. Anybody got a better way, I would love suggestions.

  8. NatsLady Says: March 2nd, 2013 at 9:15 am

    Sorry, I meant the Padres for 2012. I'd like to see if managers with young fast teams are using the double-steal and under what circumstances.

  9. Gordon, Smith, Shields keep Royals streak alive | Spring Training InformationSpring Training Information Says: March 7th, 2013 at 2:23 pm

    [...] optimism. Baseball Reference is tracking spring stats this year, and thanks to their handy “quality of opposition” tool, each player’s performance can be put into context based on the type of players [...]

  10. Gordon, Smith, Shields Keep KC Streak Alive | Arizona Online News Says: March 7th, 2013 at 6:30 pm

    [...] for optimism. Baseball Reference is tracking spring stats this year, and thanks to their handy “quality of opposition” tool, each player’s performance can be put into context based on the type of players they [...]