History
On-base plus slugging was first popularized in 1984 by John Thorn and Pete Palmer's book, The Hidden Game of Baseball. The New York Times then began carrying the leaders in this statistic in its weekly "By the Numbers" box, a feature that continued for four years. Baseball journalist Peter Gammons used and evangelized the statistic, and other writers and broadcasters picked it up. The popularity of OPS gradually spread, and by 2004 it began appearing on Topps baseball cards.
OPS was formerly sometimes known as "Production", for instance in early versions of Thorn's Total Baseball encyclopedia, and in the Strat-O-Matic computer baseball game. This term has fallen out of use.
Read more about this topic: On-base Plus Slugging
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