Ops is one of the many jargons in baseball; what does ops mean in baseball? Ops is the short form on on-base plus slugging that shows a player’s value to his team. Statistics formulas are used while calculating it, and it might seem a difficult task, yet it’s pretty interesting to know and a quick one that will express a player’s value for the team.
Now you might wonder what statistical formula is used for calculating ops and what is a good ops in baseball? You may also want to know the season’s best ops. So what does ops mean in baseball?
HOW DOES THE FORMULA WORK FOR CALCULATING OPS
Prior to calculating ops or learning what does ops mean in baseball, you will need two other statistical value of the player that includes OBP (On-base percentage) and SLG (slugging average). Before going into the details of the ops formula, let’s find out what OBP and SLG mean.
ON-BASE PERCENTAGE (OBP)
Well, it’s a strange stat that shows the number of times a player gets on base, irrespective of the means he gets on-base, compared to his total at-bats. So basically, in OBP, one thing that matters is the number of times a player gets on base be that walked or beaned and did the hit or not; all of these are counted to OBP.
SLUGGING AVERAGE (SLG)
SLG is a rare formula used for evaluating the player’s hits quality; on the contrary, batting average shows an average of his total score and how the runs are scored. A good perfect SLG is 4.000, which means the perfect ratio for home runs for at-bats. Similarly, 1.000 SLG means hitting a single in one at-bat and a home run.
Now the philosophy behind combining the two above stats into OBS has known a player’s ability to hit. So let’s find out what does ops mean in baseball and how is it calculated with examples.
WHAT DOES OPS MEAN IN BASEBALL – LEARNING THROUGH EXAMPLES
Suppose a player has an obs .385 and an SLG of .435. To find out his ops, you will only need to add these two stats, i.e., .385 + .435, which comes out to be .820 OPS. This stat shows that this player has .820 ops as a good hitter in MLB; however, he might not be an all-star or MVP of the season.
Subsequently, suppose another player with .475 obs and .505 SLG, and when you add up these two stats, you will see that his ops come out to be .980. This player could be considered for an all-star and MVP of the season.
GOOD OPS IN BASEBALL
At times it could become a challenging task for MLB fans to make sense of OPS, so to make sense of it for fans, let’s look at some of the players with good OPS.
- Babe Ruth of the New York Yankees is the leader of OPS because he is 1.1636
- Ted Williams is another MLB player whose OPS is above 1.1
- Lou Greg comes with 1.07 OPS throughout his career
- Barry Bonds is also on this list with approximately 1.05 OPS
- Mike Trout, who is still playing, has 1.0000 OPS
While the OPS, as mentioned earlier, are individual, what about leagues’ average stats? By looking at MLB stats, it can be seen that the league average OPS is between .7000 and .8000.
HIGHEST OPS OF ALL TIME IN BASEBALL
As have seen earlier, Babe Ruth is the one who has the highest OPS in the history of MLB, but what about season-by-season OPS, which shows how a player has peaked over time? Let’s find out the season-by-season OPS of Babe Ruth and Barry Bond- What does OPS mean in baseball?
- Barry Bonds, 2004: 1.4217 OPS
- Barry Bonds, 2002: 1.3807 OPS
- Barry Bonds, 2001: 1.3785 OPS
- Babe Ruth, 1920: 1.3791 OPS
- Babe Ruth, 1921: 1.3586 OPS
- Babe Ruth, 1923: 1.3089 OPS
FINAL WORD
So what does OPS mean in baseball? Since there are numerous other stats in baseball, sometimes it becomes difficult to calculate the quality of a player’s hits because solely combining obs and SLG does depict everything about a player. For that reason, one should use OPS in combination with other metrics as well to get a complete picture about a player’s performance in baseball.