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Wednesday, March 03, 2010
Runs Anything
First off, I love the name Patriot came up with. Secondly, I’m going to call shotgun on “Runs Something” for my next metric, whatever that’s going to be.
I think Patriot has a good enough process here. However he would be better off considering Runs Scored and Runners Driven In (RDI, as opposed to RBI). I think it’s weak that he says he will only consider R and RBI (and sidestep the HR issue), but then include batting outs. When I wrote my three-parter Runs Created series, I made the case that runs are split into three categories: getting on, moving over, and inning killer. Runs scored has a strong relationship to the getting on component. And outs is obviously the inning killer. Moving over is best represented by RDI not RBI. Indeed, MLB should make R and RDI the official categories not R and RBI. I don’t like the idea that had MLB constrained itself to RDI, then Patriot would have argued on selecting RDI instead and therefore bypassing the HR issue. Basically, the argument of limiting himself to runs-anything is fine, but that does not mean to limit oneself to what MLB has decided on the accounting of runs.
The next point is that once you do R+RDI (i.e., runs participated in, RPI), then it would likely make more sense to NOT do the R/lgR + RDI/lgRDI, and so you are back to RPI/lgRPI. I’ve always liked RPI, not the least of which is because at the career level it correlates so highly to Runs Created.
I agree that it a pretty weak self-imposed constraint. At least I linked to your article on R+RBI-HR based on the old FanHome thread.
My rationale, such as it was, was to limit it to categories that every baseball fan understands. By the time you start talking about subtracting home runs, you’re already losing some people (although the popularity of R+RBI-HR is an argument to the contrary). Plus R+RBI is the most favorable construct to the overrated RBI guys--the Howards, the Lees. Bringing that type of player down a peg by introducing runs scored and outs was the impetus for the metric, but I agree wholeheartedly that it could be improved upon without adding a tremendous amount of complexity.