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:

Comparison of ERA and xERA in 2009

As a sort of follow-up to last week's look at Runs Created among some top 2009 ABL batters, I've decided to run another Sabermetrics-type post. This time we'll switch gears and look at pitchers and the xERA stat.

What is xERA? xERA is short for "Expected ERA" and it is a statistic that is used to determine what a pitcher's ERA should be by removing components of the traditional ERA that are outside of a pitcher's control (fielding errors, inherited runners, bad luck, etc.) and focusing on ones that, more or less, are (hits, walks, homers and strikeouts). Today we'll compare the standard ERA of ABL pitchers to their xERA, see where the big differences are, and try to determine where some of that difference might come from.

Methodology:

You can skip this part if you're not interested in hearing how I crunched a bunch of numbers.

First, some cutoffs. The ABL season is already a small sample size, but there are some pitchers (two-way players, especially) who I feel did not throw enough innings to draw any conclusions based on their stat lines. I made the minimum 20 IP. Also, extremely high and low ERA's and xERA's were not considered. On the one hand, there are players who put up regular ERA's to the order of 0.35 or something ridiculously good like that. If you're already that low, you're good...we get it. Plus you would likely have a negative xERA which is impossible. Really high ERA's, on the other hand, I left off because I figured it would take a lot to make a terrible ERA look better (or even worse). Is a 6.70 ERA that much better than a 7.60? They're both pretty lousy so why bother.

Analysis of Runs Created in 2009

Imagine that you're an engineering student home from college on the holiday break. What's your idea of a fun evening? Getting together with old friends? Checking out the local watering hole? Calculating relatively obscure baseball stats using Microsoft Excel?

If you picked baseball stats, you and I have something in common, because that's what I've been doing tonight. I thought it would be fun to run the hitters of the All-ABL 2009 team through the Runs Created formula, as well as another top hitter from each team who didn't make the cut, and compare them. Just for fun. Because I'm a nerd.

If you're not familiar with Runs Created, it's a Sabermetric-kinda stat to help judge the true offensive production of a player. If you're not familiar with RC or Sabermetrics, go ahead and click the links above; it explains them better than I could. But in a nutshell, Runs Created is a statistic meant to better judge a player's individual offensive output and isolate him from the performance of his teammates. This is considered to be more accurate than some of the more popular statistics which are flawed for various reasons (for example, RBI is a common measure of offense, but it's heavily influenced by the ability of hitters batting ahead of the player in question).