Batting Average on Balls in Play (BABIP) is actually a pretty tried and true part of the baseball vernacular. Sabermetricians may have given it a long name with a fun-sounding acronym, but the principle goes back as far as presidential first pitches and wooden bats. Everyone knows that bloop hits and seeing eye ground balls go for hits quite regularly and that screaming rockets get snatched out of the air by leaping defenders pretty often. You couldn’t find a baseball fan alive who would argue with you on that simple fact.

BABIP is really just the amalgamation of all of those screaming rockets and bouncing grounders. When a batter puts the ball in play, it either goes for a hit or it doesn’t. Sometimes it’s a clean single, sometimes the defender can’t quite reach it. It’s a game of inches and these things happen.

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This introduction is a setup. Don’t fall for it. I’m going to present you with two stat lines and ask you to silently compare them. Your job is going to be to determine which player had the better season at the plate. Remember, it’s a trick.

• Player A: 697 PA, .372/.463/.698, .476 wOBA, 42 HR, 59 2B, 103 BB, 61 K
• Player B: 716 PA, .323/.432/.557, .423 wOBA, 27 HR, 39 2B, 110 BB, 136 K

If I hadn’t primed you, it would be hard to suggest anything other than that Player A had the better season. He’s leading everything, except for a slight disadvantage in walk rate. Player A had the better season, right? It’s obvious. Even though I told you it was a trick, you’re still struggling to find a way to argue the opposing side. I’m telling you that Player B actually had the better season, but that’s because I have more information. I know a couple of important pieces of information that you don’t have and it makes a world of difference.

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Despite all of the rhetoric and talk-radio bluster, sabermetric principles and statistics aren’t actually very complicated. It might take a sharp statistician or savvy programmer to derive perfect park factors, but it doesn’t take anything more than a curious mind to understand and apply the basics. In my time working to help spread these principles, one of the most common and useful questions I get is about which few statistics a person should learn when trying to get into the world of advanced stats.

On Wednesday during my chat I got such a question. Here’s how I responded:

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