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: