Production

Since the publication of Michael Lewis' eye opening book "Moneyball" sabermetrics have become the standard of player evaluation in baseball. The philosophies of most sabermetricians tend to stay away from the traditional stats of batting avg. ERA etc... and to emphasize a multitude of other statistics that measure more specific aspects of a player's game.

"Moneyball" focused on the the foremost sabermetric organization, the Oakland A's, and their revolutionary GM, Billy Beane. Beane and his many followers, many of whom are now GMs of their own teams, represent the norm in baseball nowadays. They believe that OBP and OPS are the best representation of an offensive player's value to his team. This is widely acknowledged to be a valid and effective strategy.

I am in 100% agreement with this philosophy, it is hard to ignore the results, but have one slight bone to pick with this general sabermetric belief. Sabermetricians and Billy Beane in particular tend to disregard speed and stolen bases as a useless asset. Now if a player steals 50 bases, but gets caught 30 times he is probably not making much of a difference to his team, but when players like Jose Reyes, Hanley Ramirez, Jimmy Rollins, and even David Wright to some extent, are creating 30- 60 extra bases on their own it is hard to discount its value. So I went looking for a statistic that takes SB into account, and really only found one, Runs Created, which to me felt like a very vague stat, how can you truly measure runs created by a player without watching every at bat and the inning that follows it. Unhappy with this estimated stat I set off to create my own statistic that effectively measures the importance of stolen bases to a team. I basically came up with a combination of OPS and RC, and I called it production or PROD. PROD, in my stat, was equal to the sum of Total Bases plus Walks plus Hit by Pitches plus Stolen Bases minus Caught Stealings divided by Plate Appearances, not At Bats because ABs don't take into account BB HBP and Sac hits. In short PROD= (TB+BB+HBP+SB-CS)/(PA). This formula gives a raw percentage which is equal to the number of bases a player averages per plate appearance. Then to adjust the data for park factor I divided the percentage by AIR, a baseball reference number that takes into account park and league factors historically, a number above 100 represents an offensive friendly enviornment and below 100 represents a pitcher friendly enviornment, and then divided AIR by 100 to get a value that set 1.00 as neutral rather than 100. So the entire formula is PROD= ((TB+BB+HBP+SB-CS)/(PA))/(AIR/100). I took the top ten Run Creators in 2007, and calculated their AIR adjusted PROD, for comparison.

(Note Miguel Cabrera and Alber Pujols tied for 10th in RC so there are actually 11 players listed)

Name----------- Prod

A- Rod---------- 0.676
Ortiz------------ 0.613
Ordonez--------- 0.594
Holliday--------- 0.554
Wright ---------- 0.598
Fielder---------- 0.601
Ramirez--------- 0.597
C. Pena---------- 0.655
Rollins----------- 0.526
Cabrera---------- 0.568
Pujols----------- 0.566

So A- Rod was the top offensive producer in the majors last year, averaging nearly .7 bases per plate appearance, shocker right, but Carlos Pena number 2? I was as skeptical as you, but after examining the numbers more closely it begins to make sense. Of the eleven players examined he was second in BB, his AIR was the lowest, but the most important number is 612, the number of PA he had last year, by far the least of the top run creators. When understanding this it is easy to see why his relatively low total of 307 TB allows for such a high PROD. rate. Other notable finds included NL MVP Jimmy Rollins and his AIR adjusted PROD. of .526 which was by far the worst, and NL MVP hopeful Matt Holliday who had a season which could possibly be considered as overrated due to the inflation of his stats by Coors field, and his low BB and SB rates.

While this is only a small sample of players I believe it is fairly indicative of the effectiveness of the PROD. stat and SB in general. Two players who had improved PROD. ranks over their RC ranks were David Wright and Hanley Ramirez who stole 34 and 51 bases respectively. Basically PROD. is an AIR adjusted variation of RC that takes into account SB, but I feel that it better quantifies the number that it produces, as a bases per plate appearance percentage rather than an estimated number of runs created.