You Have Stats – Use Them!

[CoachCeetar]

To be fair, every stat is meaningless when facing a vastly different range of opponents. My DD swing miss% is much higher against easier teams.
Wins -loss gets a bad rap. Not a good short term metric. If you look at the top 15 pitching war leaders, and the top 15 career wins leaders they are fairly close.
When competition is relative equal, like travel ball should be, pitcher win-loss vs team win- loss would probably a go too. Era, whip, depends more on who is keeping stats.

I mean, absolutely. and power hitters hit more home runs against weaker competition, and pitchers on teams with bad defense give up more unearned runs.

And often in these levels of softball the samples are pretty small too. You're looking backwards, sure a good team that's winning will have a pitcher with a lot of wins. But transport that pitcher onto a random team and you know next to nothing about how many wins they'll get in the next season.

If they strike people out though, you know that have some ability. Maybe it's all over-matched velocity that won't play up to a higher level, but If I'm picking a pitcher off a pile with just some stats to go by, I'll look for strike%, strikeouts, low walks, etc long before I even glance at w-l. (velocity, break, spin and all that if you got it too)

 

[CoachJD]

For what it is worth.
Highest OPS - 3rd
Highest remaining on base - 1
Highest remaining OPS -4
Next highest obs-2
Next highest OPS-down the lineup. With a few exceptions. If a player has speed might move up to 6-7. Much more valuable to steel in front of poorest hitters vs 8-9 steeling in front of best hitters.

The biggest mistake coaches make without stats is game management. DD team is fairly average hitting but the team average OPS is around Big Pappy, Chipper Jones, Arod. We still steel, sacrifice, take chances on the bases like Bob Ueker is batting.

The reason you don't want your best hitter batting third is, at least at the MLB level, that hitter comes up with nobody on and 2 outs more often. The #4 hitter is batting, at least one time in the game, with either at least one runner on base or they're leading off the 2nd inning.

It doesn't make a huge difference. As The Book says, it's not worth spending a large amount of time on it, but a few runs over the course of a long season can really make a difference.