THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Tuesday, September 08, 2009

Poz’s Production

In Poz’s ongoing quest to finding a stat he can champion, he’s gravitating toward a “counting” number, and the name ”Production”.

I’d post at his site, but since my office firewall doesn’t like his blatant spam-triggering content (actually, it blocks blogger and wordpress software run sites), I’ll make my comments here.

As I said, the only thing someone has to do is tell me what the user requirements are, and we’ll create a stat for it.  Joe has decided that he wants a counting stat, meaning that he only wants to count all the positive things.  He’s ignoring outs altogether.  He’s not interested in replacement or average levels (as far as I can see).  Therefore, Linear Weights Ratio is NOT the stat for him.  And he CANNOT use that as his basis.

Fortunately, a stat already exists that will satisfy him: it’s the weights that go into wOBA.  For the uninitiated, it’s here:
http://insidethebook.com/woba.shtml

So the numbers that Poz cares about is this:
0.72xNIBB + 0.75xHBP + 0.90x1B + 0.92xRBOE + 1.24x2B + 1.56x3B + 1.95xHR

RBOE is reaching base on error.  You can include 0.25 for SB and -0.50 for CS (the one exception to the positive rule).  Note that these numbers change year-by-year, and those were the numbers for the 1999-2002 era.  If you insist on static numbers, I can deliver those.

This works better than looking at the positive numbers that Joe is using from Linear Weights Ratio.  The reason is because of the way the outs and PA issue is resolved.  In Linear Weights Ratio, the denominator is outs, and so, the positive numbers get their Linear Weights values (proportionately).  But, in wOBA, the denominator is PA, which includes outs and hits and walks.  In order to get wOBA aligned properly, I need different values for the numerator.  In the article I linked to, what those values are is this:
HR 1.70, 3B 1.37, 2B 1.08, 1B 0.77, NIBB 0.62.

These are the RUN values of these events, over and above making an out.  So, a walk is +.62 runs better than an out.  For my purposes, I found it better to increase these values proportionately so that their overall (weighted) average was exactly 1.00.

For Joe’s sake, he might prefer the HR as a +1.7 because it represents something he can say like “he created 1.7 more runs with each HR than he did with an out”.  So, based on his current writings, I would say that’s the stat Joe would be favoring.

But, like I said, all we need are the user requirements.  Maybe he doesn’t know what his requirements are, and how he uses his stat will implicitly tell us.  We can derive it, and we can create something to satisfy it.

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“Production” was a stat that Pete Palmer coined, which he labelled as “PRO” to describe.... OBP+SLG (i.e., OPS).

If someone wants to link to this blog from Joe’s blog, please do so.