Analytic Hegemony: The Case for Statistics Beyond MLB

Baseball nerds (if you're reading this you're definitely one) across the world are living in a golden age of content. More information than ever is right at our fingertips. Gone are the days of having to scratch and claw your way to finding the statistics of any baseball player, including the relatively obscure ones. This golden age keeps getting better and better, and that includes the world of unaffiliated baseball.

There are four major baseball stat sites: Baseball Prospectus, Baseball-Reference, Baseball Savant, andFanGraphs. Each of those sites contains oodles and oodles of baseball statistics. They all have their own advanced stats and tend to focus all of their content around said proprietary metrics. For the purposes of this article, Baseball Savant can be tossed to the side. It is a valuable site, but they are explicit in the fact that their website and their statistics focus on Major League Baseball and Major League Baseball alone. That leaves us with the big three of Baseball Prospectus, Baseball-Reference, and FanGraphs.

Of the remaining three sites, all have integrated unaffiliated stats in some way. Baseball-Reference has basic stats for the majority of unaffiliated leagues, though their records are not perfect and are missing seasons and players of certain leagues while missing other leagues entirely. They have absolutely no advanced stats for any unaffiliated leagues.

Baseball Prospectus, in my opinion, has by far the best-advanced metrics of the bunch. However, their site is also the hardest to navigate and they have no stats for unaffiliated leagues period. They do have advanced stats for Minor League Baseball, which is good but not enough.

Lastly, FanGraphs does acknowledge the unaffiliated leagues with basic stats and partially displayed advanced stats for the Korea Baseball Organization. However, they have no other stats for any other unaffiliated leagues. Even their MiLB stats are underwhelming as they don't list the actual MiLB teams, but rather they refer to them strictly by their parent MLB club and MiLB level, ie; Dodgers (AAA).

At this point, you may be saying to yourself, of course, they don't offer unaffiliated stats, why would they? My simple argument is that each site claims to be a baseball site, not just an MLB site and as such, they should be providing more than lip service to the rest of the professional baseball world.

It's not like they are dealing with a lack of statistics either, Baseball-Reference has shown that at the bare minimum every single one of these sites could have the basic stats for all the various unaffiliated leagues. All of this costs money of course, but each site is funded through subscriptions and donations. In the end, that simply means that they have decided, much like MLB, that it's okay for baseball to be used as a monolith for MLB.

Advanced stats for unaffiliated leagues are readily available. Not for every league, but there exists a bevy of fan-run sites that have advanced stats that these bigger sites could incorporate. The Negro Leagues are covered by theSeamheads Negro Leagues Database, the Chinese Professional Baseball League hasCPBL Stats, WinterBall Dataprovides advanced stats for Liga de Béisbol Profesional de la República Dominicana, DeltaGraphsis a go-to for advanced stats for Nippon Professional Baseball, STATIZhas emerged as the leading sabermetric site for the KBO, andYirsandy Rodríguezhas a treasure trove of stats for Serie Nacional de Béisbol out of Cuba. There are more, but those are the bigger and more well-known providers of advanced stats in the unaffiliated world.

The point to all of the above is that the stats exist and there's no reason that makes sense for why the bigger sites haven't worked with the smaller sites/proprietors to either use their stats or collaborate with them to tweak their stats to make them fit their own. It is incumbent upon sites like Baseball Prospectus, Baseball-Reference, and FanGraphs to stand against the narrative that MLB is all there is to baseball.

Unfortunately, when it comes down to basic and advanced stats they are letting that idea flourish. Going to Baseball-Reference and seeing the OPS+ for every player in Liga Mexicana del Pacífico shouldn't be some pipe dream but a reality where Baseball-Reference actually lives up to the meaning of its name.

I'm doubtful we'll ever see a day where advanced stats for unaffiliated leagues are easily accessible on any or all of the major sites. That's a shame because making those stats readily available would go a long way towards making those leagues seem more legitimate in the eyes of fans.

Instead, baseball fans go to those sites and see that MLB, or affiliated advanced stats, are the only thing to be found and leave thinking that MLB is all there is to baseball. With MLB desiring hegemony over the baseball world, the big stat sites shouldn't be giving them that in the analytics department as well.