What is a “Junk Stat,” anyway?

There are two fundamental characteristics of  a junk stat:

1. It is created by combining other, more established statistics. In other words, it contains no new information.
2. It holds no pretensions of actual usefulness. It is intended, rather, to be interesting or entertaining.

A good junk stat does not necessarily tell you anything about how good a player is, but it should tell you something interesting about that player’s skills, how lucky he has been, and so forth. For instance, is it important that a player be able to prevent infield outs? Not really–many of the best hitters rate poorly in this statistic. But it can tell us who has the necessary skills (speed, hustle, hitting high bouncers) to make the best of the normally bad situation of a ball hit to an infielder.

In short, junk stats are the “fun uncles” of the baseball statistics family. They aren’t going to help you with your homework or take you to soccer practice, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have their value.

For more information about particular junk stats, check out our glossary

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About this site

JunkStats.com is devoted to creating, explaining, and applying junk stats in baseball. It also features digressions into general baseball commentary, particularly events related to the Atlanta Braves (my favorite team).

I didn’t invent the term “junk stat”… I believe I first read it in a Joe Posnanski post a while back, but I can’t find it anywhere, so maybe I imagined that. At any rate, I’m not taking credit for the phrase; I just like junk stats so much that I created a whole site around them.

This site runs on WordPress

blogging software, using the Platform theme by Pagelines . I also use fonts from Typekit .

About the author

Jacob Peterson is a lifelong Braves fan. His childhood was narrated by Skip Caray, Pete Van Weiren, and The Simpsons (not to mention Joe Simpson). He also writes for TalkingChop.com

, the #1 Braves blog.