We’ll begin our first discussion on baseball with a commonly asked question. I’m sure you’ve seen it before, so this discussion won’t be long and tedious, but it’s an important one to set the foundation of what we’ll be building upon here in our Intro course. So the question is, when we think of a good player, what do we think of him doing that makes him good?

Well, that’s actually a fairly easy question. The best players contribute the most to helping their teams win. But what do they do to contribute to wins? What does a good player do that gets wins for his teams? Here’s where your opinion may diverge. Some people prefer players who rack up hits. Some downplay the preference of large numbers of hits in favor for extra bases and of course, home run pop. Others prefer players who walk and get . Still others prefer speed. Others even go into the mythical realm of clutch, grit, and good ol’ fashioned ballplayer-ness and look to grab those types.

So which one is right? Which type of player among these listed most contributes to wins?

The answer is “it depends.” The reason why it is is twofold: 1) when I mention these types of hitters, I don’t know the exact numbers that we’re talking about here, and 2) wins ultimately aren’t measured by hits, walks, strikeouts, or even home runs, though homers get more to the point. No, games are ultimately measured in runs, and that’s a crucial point when we evaluate players. If you don’t score runs, you can’t win games, and if you allow too many, your chances of winning are bad too.

Now you may think to yourself “I’m supposed to evaluate players based on runs scored?” Well, no, not entirely. League runs scored, yes. Individual runs scored, no. We have to derive the run contributions of player within a certain contezxt, whether at the league or team level. However, once we get down to the individual level, contributions from other players are entering into the mix, particularly in runs scored, so we can’t use that as a measurement of run production, odd as it may seem.

But if there is no tracked stat called “runs” for a player that measures his production to the team, don’t we have to depend on things like hits, walks, homers, and other measurables? Yes and no. Yes, those stats that a player accrues over the course of a season or a career are indeed the things we must use to evaluate a player’s production, but the key is that those stats have no meaning without being converted to runs. Of course, intrinsically more hits, more walks, more home runs yields more runs, but to what extent? How much do each of those events weigh in determining runs?

Here we enter the world of run estimators, and that will the primary fundamentals discussion next week. For now, I’ll open with a beginning look at run estimators. You saw one type of run estimator in the glossary: linear weights. There I described the creation of linear weights using an empirical analysis, mainly the run expectancy differences between base/out states. We’re going to drop back a bit and talk about one of the first run estimators created and the elementary basis for all other run estimators, Runs Created.

Runs Created was first introduced in 1979 with a purpose of determining a number of total runs contributed by players on a team. I’ll go into more detail about the construct of RC in one of our next fundamentals discussions, but I’ll leave you with the essential formula of RC. RC at its absolute base is represented in this form:

Runs = A*B/C

Where A = on-base factor; B = Advancement factor; and C = Opportunities

Without knowing what exactly goes into these inputs, it should be clear what James means by each term. On-base factor must have something to do with baserunners, advancement factor must have something to do with movement of these baserunners, and the opportunities factor must be measured by something like at-bats or plate appearances. That being said, the question to consider for next Friday, when we’ll dive into Runs Created, is whether this construct makes sense.

Reading Assignments

1. Colin Wyers has a great article about runs and how they happen to be made. He breaks down how fractions of runs get made so that we can all understand just what the heck 0.5 runs is!

2. Here’s a piece by Patriot at his old site regarding Runs Created. This is good reading for the next piece, as I’ll be breaking down and trying to further simplify a lot of things that Patriot discusses in the article, so it would be nice to get familiar with the topic.

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