Acronyms to Go

I was reading The Athletic this morning, stories about Ivan Nova of the White Sox and Anthony Rizzo of the Cubs, or trying to read stories about those two.  It was hard because I kept running across these acronyms: ISO, FIP, DRA, wRC+.  For all I knew, the Russians were sending messages in code.

But, No, the authors of both stories were writing in the gibber-speak peculiar to analytics.  ISO stands for “isolated power,” to get at a batter’s true power potential; FIP stands for “fielding independent pitching,” purportedly an improved version of ERA;  DRA is “deserved run average,” and how that differs from FIP is beyond me; and wRC+, wouldn’t you know, means “weighted runs plus,” not to be confused with your ordinary “weighted runs,” I guess.  This isn’t baseball just as it isn’t baseball journalism.

 From what I can tell, wRC+ relates to the total number of runs generated by a batter.  Trust me when I say the formula for wRC (the + being a refinement) would give Einstein pause.  And I wonder, is Cubs’ manager Joe Maddon running the formula through his head as he tries to understand the drop in Rizzo’s power numbers?  If so, Maddon is in a place I never want to be.

As a rule, I dislike people who use language to intimidate and confuse; think George Will or William F. Buckley Jr.  The same holds for baseball analytics.  People throw around numbers the way Buckley did adjectives.  For all those devotees of ISO, FIP etc., all I can say is this.

KISS.