Rob Engel calls it the bar test.
No, he’s not talking about the exam hopeful lawyers have to take in order to practice law. Engel’s test is more a gut check about whether advanced baseball statistics on a TV screen would make sense to fans watching a ballgame at a noisy bar.
Would the stat make sense to the average fan? What if the sound on the TV is off? Is a newer stat like catch probability self-explanatory?
“Kind of like telling a joke,” said Engel, director of baseball engineering at MLB Advanced Media. “You don’t want to explain the punchline of a joke.