Analysis of Runs Created in 2010

Sabermetricising the ABL's most productive hitters.

Bret Schwartz paced the league with 37.15 RC in 2010

Now that the off-season has fully sunk in and the final 2010 statistics are upon us, we can start the work of going through the stat sheets and taking apart the numbers, and try to make sense of it all. During the last off-season, one of my more popular statistical analysis posts was using the Runs Created stat, so I'd like to start this winter off on the right foot by reviving that old buddy -- and expanding upon it.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the term "sabermetrics" or the more advanced stats, here's a quick rundown. The idea is that the simple stats every baseball fan is familiar with all have little flaws that make them faulty or not quite as useful as they could be. For example, you can use AVG to determine if someone is a good hitter, but you're neglecting how often they walk, sacrifice, get extra-base hits, etc. You could look at RBI as a measure of productiveness, but then you're not just looking at one player but also the guys who bat -- and either reach base or fail to do so -- in the order ahead of him. At the end of the day, though, the only thing that matters is how many runs a player helped put on the board, regardless of how he did it. Runs Created tries (rather successfully) to isolate one player's performance, and at the same time, include all aspects of a player's offense. If you read last year's post, I used the exact same formula that I did for the 2009 players, including the constant that I derived empirically to adjust to the ABL.

So here (after the jump!) is the table of the top 25 ABL batters in Runs Created in 2010:

2010 ABL Runs Created - Top 25
Player	Team	RC
Schwartz,  Bret	Miners	37.15
Mee,  Andy	Miners	35.82
Grimes,  Tyler	Oilers	27.23
Bermudez,  Pablo	Miners	27.15
DeBiasse,  Nick	Miners	25.58
Thigpen,  Wesley	Miners	24.78
Parnell,  Aaron	Fire	24.19
Hairgrove,  Trevor	Pilots	23.84
Terry,  Cody	Fire	22.13
Serritella,  Chris	Bucs	21.58
Ruch,  Tyler	Miners	21.17
Watson,  Will	Fire	20.89
Wisdom,  Patrick	Oilers	20.13
Vincej,  Zach	Bucs	19.74
Mathews,  Ryan	Fire	19.40
Gebhart,  Ryan	Oilers	19.18
Piscotty,  Stephen	Oilers	18.80
Medina,  Martin	Panners	18.71
Schoch,  Mark	Fire	18.59
Tauchman,  Mike	Panners	18.34
Chung,  Derrick	Panners	17.31
Crank,  Coley	Bucs	17.28
Maitland,  Tim	Pilots	16.41
Sikorski,  Jesse	Panners	16.39

Now that we have a year behind us, it's interesting to look back and see how this compares to last year. I had a discussion with an anonymous commenter (sorry I can't give you better credit for your input...you'll have to post with a name next time!) on a previous Odds & Ends post about how Drew Heid compares to Bret Schwartz, considering they both posted averages over .400 in 2009 and 2010 respectively. The reader commented that Heid was so far ahead of Schwartz that the two didn't belong in the same sentence. Well, I think Schwartz is a heck of a ball player, but as far as offense goes his league-leading 37.15 runs created on the season are still a pretty good tick off Heid's 52.91. The stats don't lie, and I have to concede this point to the aforementioned reader.

While we're on the subject, here's a little something to put things into perspective. The 162-game MLB season is about 3.68 times longer than the current-era ABL season. Last year Albert Pujols led the majors with 165 runs created. Extrapolating the above numbers, Heid would have hit 195 over the course of a full MLB year; Schwartz would have had 137.

In addition to the standard runs created stat, I invented a little statistic: at-bats per run created. It's just like it sounds, a measurement of the number of at-bats required, on average, for a hitter to create a run. A lower number is better, in this case. There are two reasons I did this, and two problems that you should be aware of with this statistic before taking it with anything other than a grain of salt. I wanted to have an "average" stat to compensate for players who only made it up for half the season, and I also wanted something to involve the at-bat statistic so I could juxtapose it against AVG. The problems with this are that half a season is something like 20 games (though the cut-off point for players considered was 40 plate appearances, FYI) so there's the small sample size, and the using at-bats introduces some of the wonkiness that RC tries to take out of the equation. So, in other words, this statistic is just for illustrative purposes and isn't perfect. Here's the numbers...

2010 ABL At-Bats per RC - Top 25 (vs. AVG)
Player	Team	AB/RC	AVG
Schwartz,  Bret	Miners	4.23	0.420
Bermudez,  Pablo	Miners	4.82	0.351
Mee,  Andy	Miners	4.83	0.353
Montalbano,  Paul	Pilots	5.20	0.282
Parnell,  Aaron	Fire	5.54	0.299
Thigpen,  Wesley	Miners	5.65	0.307
Grimes,  Tyler	Oilers	5.73	0.288
Mathews,  Ryan	Fire	5.98	0.284
Ruch,  Tyler	Miners	6.00	0.323
Hege,  Ryan	Oilers	6.01	0.357
Hairgrove,  Trevor	Pilots	6.04	0.304
DeBiasse,  Nick	Miners	6.37	0.325
Moczygemba,  Reagan	Miners	6.45	0.328
Medina,  Martin	Panners	6.58	0.272
Serritella,  Chris	Bucs	6.86	0.304
Terry,  Cody	Fire	6.87	0.263
Gebhart,  Ryan	Oilers	7.04	0.222
Watson,  Will	Fire	7.13	0.322
Schoch,  Mark	Fire	7.26	0.311
Pippin,  Quinn	Miners	7.37	0.226
Lyon,  David	Miners	7.41	0.269
Crank,  Coley	Bucs	7.46	0.248
Piscotty,  Stephen	Oilers	7.55	0.289
Dickson,  Okoyea	Pilots	7.60	0.250

The main point I wanted to make with this table -- other than, again, giving some name-space to players who did well in limited plate appearances -- is that you can hit for a low average and still be an above-average offensive threat. Case in point: Ryan Gebhart of the Oilers' created a run every 7.04 at-bats but hit only .222, while the Fire's Will Watson created a run every 7.13 at-bats while hitting .322 (100 points better).

That should give you stat-heads something to chew on for a bit. Last year I used the xERA stat to look at pitchers, so I don't see any reason why I won't do that again this year. If things go as planned, I'll keep turning out some write-ups of other advanced statistics throughout the off-season; I'm still just getting a handle on the sabermetrics-type stuff myself, but like pretty much everything else on this blog, I figure the best way to learn is to get my hands dirty and go for it. So look for some more interesting statistical analysis posts all off-season.