State of DIII Baseball Pt. 1

The end of another baseball season has come and brought us a slew of interesting bits of information to have a look at. Lynchburg and Johns Hopkins faced off in the National Championship, an exciting matchup to say the least, with a stout pitching staff up against a powerful offense. That series came down to the two final innings of the third game to be decided, a series that showcased the trends of NCAA DIII baseball this season and where the game seems to be heading.

In comparing data taken from the last five seasons (Not including 2020) you can look at the game from a macroscopic view and pick out different elements that have continued to change as the years have progressed or have stayed the same.

In this edition the focus will be on the two main statistics that can most effectively quantify hitting and pitching with the statistics publicly available for DIII baseball.

Weighted On-Base Average (wOBA) is one of, if not the most, important overall offensive stats that is out there. The statistic is based on the idea that not all hits are equal in value and should be weighted based on their past run value. To get a deeper look at wOBA and run values, FanGraphs has a great article to break it all down.

On the pitching side, Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP) is a popular statistic that you have likely heard of before if you are a baseball fan. The idea behind FIP is to measure what a pitcher’s performance would be with all things being equal to every other pitcher. In order to accomplish that, you can only really look at the things that pitchers control, i.e. nothing surrounding balls that are put in play inside the park. For more information on FIP, FanGraphs also does a great job with this one.

That aside, it’s time to get into the data. Bear in mind that the data collected is from stats.ncaa.org and there are some holes but nevertheless we have collected a very high percentage of available data to bring you the following conclusions.

IN THE BOX