Stat of the Week

Yesterday's Recap

Rox's offensive returns to normal. An easy 10 - 5 win. Gee if the Rox's average 5.7 runs for the remaining 97 games then we hit 830 runs scored! Maybe? We shall see...

Stat of the Week - Total Base Plus

My newly developed stat is Total Base Plus. What does it mean? Well from my review of various player evaluation stats it seems to me that besides Win Shares there is really no way of comparing offense players to pitchers and vice versa. In my thinking there has to be another way. So I came up with the one factor that one can compare apples to apples and that is bases. Bases you say...yup what is the essence of baseball but getting your players to get on base and your pitchers to prevent people from getting on base. So how about coming up with a way to measure either the total bases a player collects or prevents? Okay to me this is relatively straightforward you simply count the bases the player collects over a season. For instance in 2007, Todd Helton had 682 plate appearances with 117 singles, 42 doubles, 2 triples, 17 homers, and 116 walks. So for 682 plate appearances Todd has the opportunity to touch 2,728 individual bases. From his hits and walks Todd was able to obtain 475 total bases. In comparison Aaron Cook faced 698 hitters and allowed 123 singles, 38 doubles, 2 triples, 15 homers, and 44 walks. So Cook had the opportunity to prevent 2,792 bases but gave up 385 total bases. Okay so Todd got 17.4% of the total bases he could and Aaron only gave up 13.8% of bases. OK so now what? Well MLB players in 2007, had 188,623 plate appearances with 29,885 singles, 9,197 doubles, 938 triples, 4,957 homers, and 16,079 walks. So MLB took approximately 11.5% of the bases that were provided. Since Todd took 17.4% versus the league's 11.5% and if we assume that 11.5% is 100 then Todd comes in at 151 or about 50% better thant the average MLBer. And Cook would be at 83 or about 15% worse in allowing bases. So there you have it, a pretty way to compare apples to apples. For Win Shares Todd had 24 versus Cook's 10. About the only thing I think this sort of compares to is VORP but I believe the "Replacement Player" is such a slacker that it sets the "average" player too low (?). Now of course one can't take something as simplistic as this and keep it this way you have to muck up the simplicity. How does one do that? Well what about hit by pitches, stolen bases, caught stealing, errors, double plays, sacrifices, runs batted in? What about Cook's actual at-bats? What about Helton's errors? Basically a total base representation of every player's mark on a game and season? I need more computing power...