At this point, it would not shock anybody to suggest that statistics are highly useful in sports for everyone from general managers to journalists to fans watching on television. Of the major U.S. sports, baseball is the sport most easily captured in statistics, due in part to the basic essence of baseball being direct one-on-one confrontations between pitchers and hitters.
But as well as statistics do at evaluating performance and telling us information that give us some idea about future performance, that's not all they are good for. Baseball is more than who is better than who and which players are earning their salaries. Deion Sanders was never a MLB All-Star, but my early-1990s baseball experience wouldn't have been quite the same without his blazing speed and his superhuman ability to transition from NFL Hall of Fame cornerback to average major leaguer with the apparent ease of turning on a light switch.
Statistics are also more than analytic tools; they can tell stories as well. Looking at a player's statistical lines for his career tells you a lot more about a player than how good they were. You can see where the player had his big breakout season or identify the season he was traded in a pennant race. You can see when his bat speed started slowing down and his batting averages dropped -- or the season a leg injury sapped his base-stealing ability. You can see the point at which a former star's declining skills resulted in him being relegated to a lesser role -- or the tough decision to hang up the cleats.
ESPN Insider Keith Law has been talking about tools, which aren't generally associated with statistics, but they do belong together. Stats tell us lots of cool things about players and their tools, many of which have nothing to do with Player X having 0.7 more WAR than Player Y.
With that, let's dive into some sabermetric statistics, compare them to the tools we see on the field and determine a handful of unique awards.
The Usain Bolt award
Winner: Billy Hamilton
Cincinnati Reds
The easiest way to determine who the fastest player in baseball is would be to line up all of MLB's fastest players and pit them against each other in a race. While I think this would be a pretty sweet event -- maybe during the All-Star break? -- it's not likely to happen, and even if it did, one tweaked hamstring probably would end the event. So we have to use other means to determine this statistically.
While not as famous as other things he did, Bill James' speed score is a fun tool for this kind of question. While it can't measure who would win a footrace, there are a number of things that fast players do better than slow players on a baseball field: They steal bases more often and more successfully, they score on hits more often, they ground into fewer double players, and they hit more triples.
In 2015, the player with the highest speed score is Hamilton. While he's following a good rookie season with a lackluster sophomore campaign overall, he is demonstrating that old "speed doesn't slump" adage. Following Hamilton is multi-dimensional Lorenzo Cain of the Royals and Billy Burns of the A's, whose name even sounds like someone who played in the dead ball era. The ZiPS' future projections also place Hamilton as the fastest player in baseball going forward.
The Smartest Baserunner award
Winner: Josh Reddick
Oakland Athletics