In baseball statistics

Baseball statistics

Statistics play an important role in summarizing baseball performance and evaluating players in the sport.Since the flow of a baseball game has natural breaks to it, and normally players act individually rather than performing in clusters, the sport lends itself to easy record-keeping and statistics...

, NERD (a wink towards towards the mnemonic

Mnemonic

A mnemonic , or mnemonic device, is any learning technique that aids memory. To improve long term memory, mnemonic systems are used to make memorization easier. Commonly encountered mnemonics are often verbal, such as a very short poem or a special word used to help a person remember something,...

 "Narration, Exposition, Reflection, Description") is a quantitative measure of expected aesthetical value. NERD was originally created by Carson Cistulli

Carson Cistulli

Carson Cistulli is an American poet, essayist and English professor. His works of poetry include Some Common Weaknesses Illustrated, Assorted Fictions, and A Century of Enthusiasm.- Early Years :...

 and is part of his project of exploring the "art" of sabermetric research

Sabermetrics

Sabermetrics is the specialized analysis of baseball through objective, empirical evidence, specifically baseball statistics that measure in-game activity. The term is derived from the acronym SABR, which stands for the Society for American Baseball Research...

. The original NERD formula only took into account the pitcher's expected performance while the current model factors in the entire team's performance.

History

The premise for NERD was developed in Cistulli's piece "Why We Watch" in which he establishes the five reasons that baseball continues to captivate the American imagination from game to game: "Pitching Matchups," "Statistically Notable (or Otherwise Compelling) Players," "Rookies (and Debuts)," "Seasonal Context," and "Quality of Broadcast". Fellow sabermatrician Rob Neyer

Rob Neyer

Rob Neyer is a baseball author and writer for SB Nation. He started his career working for Bill James and STATS, and then joined ESPN.com as a columnist from 1996 to January 2011 before becoming SB Nation's National Baseball Editor...

, who had collaborated with Cistulli on this piece, wrote "the only thing missing [...] is a points system that would let us put a number on each game" and on June 2, 2010 Cistulli unveiled the NERD Pitching formula.

NERD pitching

NERD pitching tries to determine which pitchers will be the most aesthetically appealing to watch for a baseball fan and is both a historical and a predictive statistic. The NERD pitching formula uses a players standard deviations from the mean (a weighted z-score) of the DIPS

Defense independent pitching statistics

In baseball, defense-independent pitching statistics measure a pitcher's effectiveness based only on plays that do not involve fielders: home runs allowed, strikeouts, hit batters, walks, and, more recently, fly ball percentage, ground ball percentage, and line drive percentage...

 statistic xFIP, swinging strike percentage, overall strike percentage, and the differential between the pitchers ERA

ERA

Era refers to a long period of historyERA or Era may also refer to:In games and sports:* Earned run average, a baseball statistic* Era Online, a computer game* English Racing Automobiles, a manufacturer of racing carsIn music:...

 and xFIP to determine a quantitative value for each pitcher.



The factor of 4.69 is added to make the number fit on a 0 to 10 scale. While there has been some disagreement on the calculation of Cistulli's luck component the general consensus among sports writers seems to be that a player with a below average ERA and an above average xFIP has been "unlucky".

Team NERD

Following the model of his Pitching NERD, Team NERD tries to give a quantitative value to the aesthetic value of each of the 30 baseball teams. For factors it accounts for "Age," "Park-Adjusted wRAA," "Park-Adjusted Home Run per Fly Ball (HR/FB)," "Team Speed," "Bullpen Strength," "Team Defense," "Luck" (Base Runs – Actual Runs Scored), and "Payroll".



In a recent interview Cistulli admitted that there is a disconnect between The Rays

Tampa Bay Rays

The Tampa Bay Rays are a Major League Baseball team based in St. Petersburg, Florida. The Rays are a member of the Eastern Division of MLB's American League. Since their inception in , the club has played at Tropicana Field...

 high tNERD rating and low attendance saying that he is considered adding a "park-adjustment" to his formula which would reflect either the stadium itself or "attendance relative to the stadium's capacity" but overall reception of this statistic has been positive and Fangraphs

Fangraphs

FanGraphs.com is a website run by Fangraphs Inc., located in Arlington, Virginia, and created and owned by David Appelman that provides statistics for every player in Major League Baseball history....

started reporting Team NERD in Cistulli's One Night Only columns beginning August 23rd, 2010.