Glossary of Terms

I plan to throw around a lot of terms in this blog that many baseball fans may or may not be used to. So that I may avoid defining the same stat over and over, and in order to avoid any serious confusion, I'm going to create a glossary of terms for people to check out if they ever stumble across a phrase or stat that they are unfamiliar with.

• VORP: Value Above Replacement Player. A replacement player is definied as someone with the minimum threshold of talent necessary to be a professional MLB player. VORP is an all-in-one offensive statistic designed to figure out how many more runs a given player is worth compared to a replacement level player at the same position (very important). If a player has a VORP of 10, he is worth ten more runs than a replacement level player; on average, ten VORP runs equal one win for a team, so a player with a VORP of ten is worth one more win to his team than a replacement player. VORP allows for easy comparisons of players at different positions. VORP is a counting stat, much like home runs or RBIs, meaning the best players will see their totals steadily rise as the season progresses. VORP does not account for defense.
• EqA: Equivalent Average. A summation of a player's total offensive output (including steals), adjusted for league, era, and even ballpark, calibrated into a format similar to batting average. A .260 EqA is completely average; .300 is very good; .350 is Hall of Fame-level.
• FRAR: Fielding Runs Above Replacement. Much like VORP, only for defense. How many runs does a given player save with his defense compared to a replacement level player?
• FRAA: Fielding Runs Above Average. Same as FRAR, only the player's defense is compared to the average major leaguer at the same position, not merely someone good enough to only just make the majors.
• WARP (WARP1, WARP2, WARP3): Wins Above Replacement Player. An all-in-one statistic that attempts to quantify a player's contribution to his team. Like VORP, a player's position factors into the rating. WARP accounts for offense, defense, base-running, and pitching (if necessary). The difference between WARP 1, 2, and 3 is a series of adjustments: I will typically only use WARP3 on this website, because it has the greatest number of adjustments and allows for comparisons of players from any era. For more, visit http://www.baseballprospectus.com/
• Replacement Player: A concept I will refer to repeatedly on the site. A replacement player is a ballplayer with the minimum level of talent necessary to make the majors, and no more. A team comprised entirely of replacement players will be one of the worst teams of all time: We're talking 1899 Cleveland Spiders badness (in fact, it could be argued that the Spiders are the only baseball team in history that actually was made up of only replacement players; prior to the 1899 season, Cleveland's owners bought a team in St. Louis and shipped all the stars of the Spiders, incuding Cy Young, to St. Louis in exchange for swill; the Spiders posted a record of 20-134). For example, a replacement level pitcher will have an ERA of roughly 6.00.
• Enhanced OPS: A stat I invented as a means to figure out how steals impact slugging and how caught stealing impacts OBP. For more, see my "Return to Blogging" post.
• OPS+/ERA+: An adjustment to measure how much better or worse, percentage wise, a player is compared to league average in either OPS or ERA. An OPS+ of 100 is league average (and is always league average), while a player with an OPS+ of 101 is 1% better than the average player. The same is true for ERA.

I expect I'll update this list as I think of more terms to include.