The Modal Slash Line, 2010-2019

What follows was inspired by an interesting podcast episode by NPR’s Planet Money, which outlined one potential process for identifying “The Modal American.” The podcast’s creators suggested that, while people often refer to the “average” American and policy changes are often evaluated by their median effect on households, perceiving the US population through the lens of its mode might be an interesting exercise. As such, they aimed to identify not the average or median American, but the “Modal” American.

The mode, a metric some might remember from as far back as elementary school math, represents the figure which appears most often in a field or dataset. Of the trio of those early-taught descriptive statistics (mean, median, and mode), the mode seems to be a bit under-acknowledged. It isn’t terribly tough to reason why that might be. Even in the context of baseball, it’s probably better to know a hitter’s batting average than to know the most common outcome of his plate appearances (hint: it’s an out). Despite this, the following post has adopted that intriguing podcast concept and briefly applied it to baseball.

The first goal of this exercise is to simply determine the most common, or modal, slash lines (BA/OBP/SLG) over the last decade. From there, I check on the 2010s’ most common OPS and finally its most common “triple crown” (BA/HRs/RBIs) stat lines. Finally, in order to juxtapose recent periods, those same three lists have been replicated for the 2000s.

One glaring issue with determining a mode with data as specific as baseball data is that there might not be many instances of any one number. In the case of batting average alone, which is calculated out to the thousandths place, it might be rare to find three players with the same average in any given season. If finding players with one identical stat is tough, finding players with an identical triple slash (BA, OBP, SLG) might be an exercise in futility, even with data from a full decade. To address this, those triple slash statistics have been rounded to the hundredths place. As such, a player who hit .263 will have their average rounded down and they will be bucketed in with the .260 hitters along with anyone else who hit between .255 and .264. That same rounding has been additionally applied to both player on-base and slugging percentages. After having done this, that “bucket” with the most player-seasons within its boundaries is then considered the modal slash line.

There were 1,429 qualifying player-seasons in the 2010s for hitters. Below is the modal slash line for that period. You’ll find that, even after rounding, grouping players by three statistics results in rather small groups.

Just 7 player-seasons made up the most populous group for slash lines, a total diminutive enough to underscore the vast variability in performances across a decade. In fact, of 1,429 players, there were 951 combinations of those three rounded statistics. That “modal” line, ~.260/~.330/~.370, isn’t terribly robust in this case. The players who had the most “typical” seasons of the 2010s were: Carlos Lee (2012), Alberto Callaspo (2013), Yunel Escobar (2013), Howie Kendrick (2016), Jordy Mercer (2016), Jacoby Ellsbury (2016), and Lorenzo Cain (2019).

Featuring fewer buckets to put players into does give way to larger groupings though. Below in Figure 2 is the modal combination of OPS ingredients in the 2010s.

The modal OPS combination of ~.730 was greater than that of the modal slash lines OPS (~.700). With 20, there are more members in this group too. Next, the modal outcome for triple crown statistics.

From 2010-2019, more than one player per season batted between .265-.274 with between 18-22 home runs and 73-77 RBIs. In other words, if you were asked to predict the most likely triple crown stat line to occur off the bat of any individual in 2021 (assuming a 162 game season), grouped as the above, this line might not be a bad one to bet on, although your odds are still far from enviable given this line occurred in just 13 of 1,429 instances over the decade.

How do these modal seasons compare to seasons from a decade earlier? Below are the same three figures, rounded and grouped in the same manner, but for player-seasons from 2000-2009. As you’ll see, the 2000s appeared to be a particularly offense-friendly era for the modal player.

Here the modal slash line sums to ~.800, a full 100 points higher than in the 2010s. In fact, a slash line resulting in a ~.860 OPS was the second most often occurrence. Those most typical player-seasons of the 2000s were produced by: Plácido Polanco (2003), Joe Randa (2003), Raúl Ibañez (2003), Juan Encarnación (2005), Nick Markakis (2006/2009), Orlando Hudson (2006), Shane Victorino (2008), and Kelly Johnson (2008). Nick Markakis, a pillar of consistency, is the only player to be on a modal list twice.

Figures 5 and 6 cover model OPS-combinations and modal triple crown stats of the 2000s, respectively.

Interestingly, the modal count statistics in the 2000s given above generally pale in comparison to the rate statistics in previous figures. In fact, modal home run and RBI counts were higher in the 2010s than in the 2000s.

Generally speaking, this was a pretty whimsical exercise. Done again, the rounding might be more significant in order to create fewer buckets. Regardless, it is a different way of perceiving performance that featured some interesting outcomes.