There are several different ways to measure consistency. This is almost certainly the best. What I (and I assume USG) was saying inarticulately in my post was that there is no one single number which describes how consistent a player will be. It is certainly measurable. This DOES go back to the clutch discussion in that, in the same way, most players are not streaky enough to register year after year as streaky, but some players are able to consistently show themselves as consistent players. It is only useful information for players who are either consistently consistent or consistently unconsistent over the course of a year.

It’s another piece of information which is irrelevant for most players but worth looking at because it IS relevant for some, and it is good information to have ( for example Bay and Youkilis’ career wOBA’s are within .003 points of each other, Bay is slightly higher, however, I think Youk is much more reliable.

No i disagree about month-by month consistency. And be clear, I’m not saying that it is accurate to judge a player by how well he does in June of 2008, I’m saying if a player is very streaky (like Bay) they will perform well at times, and perform very poorly at times (for the record, I’m using him a lot as an example, but I love the guy). I’m not saying look at an individual month, I’m saying look at his BA and his wOBA over the season in different time periods and you will see some batters perform consistently over different periods and some don’t (consistency is measurable, it is just not easily able to sum up in one easy to look at stat. I love sabremetric stats, I use them all the time, I only have an issue with people who will take the lowest common denominator of sabremetric stats (IE WAR which says very little about what a team needs in a player) and use that to demonstrate the players value to a club. Details are important too.

Perhaps you misunderstood what I was trying to say originally. Probably my fault, I apologize. What I was saying (which I later retracted after researching more stats!) was that the team was unable to consistently provide enough runs to win. Providing a stat number of how many games they only scored one run and how many games they scored beyond 8 runs is practically completely irrelevant to this. I do stand by the fact that my analysis was more accurate (though as I said in the same post, still completely bunk). I took issue with the thresholds, I took issue with the entire system of analyzing that information.

I know that I agree with what I’ve seen from USG on most every major issue, and I’m sure he would probably back me up that his stats were not any more relevant than the ones I provided (if not, I apologize!).

What I said originally was a false assumption, which I shouldn’t have made (and usually am not prone to, usually I research everything way too much), and I did change my mind about it after looking at the stats. It’s always easy to forget that the beginning half of the season is mainly forgotten by the time you get to the end.