What if OPS Covered SB

[PitchingWinsGames]

I've brought this up to a few people before, including Swift and more recently Rabb and CrimsonCane, but I've long since thought about why OPS doesn't include SBs. Mind you, this is ignoring stuff like WAR and the more "hip" SABR numbers.

Similarly, CS would have to factor into it, but where. Logically, SB are bases a batter would get, so why not factor it into SLG and CS is basically negating a hit, so why not subtract from OBP.

So, that'd wind up being something like this:

[{H+BB+HBP}-CS]/{AB+BB+HBP})] + [(TB+SB)/AB]

Excuse the formatting, but you get the gist.

The perfect example to test it on, in my opinion, is Rickey Henderson

Unadjusted career OPS:

.279/.401/.419 - .810 OPS

Now, everyone knows you could "split Rickey in half and have two HOFers" (excuse the paraphrasing) but that .810 OPS really isn't indicative on quick glance of what he's done.

"adujusted":

.279/.377/.547 - .924 OPS

Now that's more reasonable for an easy HOFer like Henderson, aesthetically.

So, what about this year? What kind of impact does it have here?

Well, this year's OPS leaders were:

Hamilton
Cabrera
Votto
Pujols
Bautista
Konerko
Carlos Gonzalez
Tulowitzki
Matt Holliday
Jayson Werth

Now, if we use this "OPSB", if you will, not much changes... Votto takes the lead and the others more or less shake up the top 10, unsurprising... But Some names do make some big jumps. Hanley's .835 OPS suddenly turns into a .935 and puts him 13th, Carl Crawford takes a similar jump to being a top 10 player and Shin-Soo Choo falls in 12th.

Anywho, just something I found interesting

[Jay]

i like the idea but i doubt they would make those changes to how obp and slg is calculated to include cs and sb. And without that they would not be calculated into ops.

It is just another number to look at when statistically evaluating a players number and in math theory it makes sense to do this but people don't like to rank sb to such an importance.

[Swifty]

Yeah, PWG knows I've been pushing the concept of "hidden slugging" for a while, glad to see he came up with something to make it work.

[Bobbob1313]

I've definitely thought of this before.

If you wanted to be even more accurate, you want to also take into account pick offs and times thrown out taking an extra base, along with extra bases taken.

[PitchingWinsGames]

I've definitely thought of this before.

If you wanted to be even more accurate, you want to also take into account pick offs and times thrown out taking an extra base, along with extra bases taken.

Well, I was using the most easily/readily available stuff I could find to do this. There are more advanced numbers that quantify baserunning in that sense because, to my knowledge, there are no easy numbers for "taking an extra base"... and don't POs count as CS for baserunners anyways? I'm on little rest so excuse me if that's a dumb question.

[Bobbob1313]

I don't think they do, I think it's a seperate number.

That's why there are CS, PO, and POCS for when you get picked off and run.
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http://www.baseball-reference.com/pl...ng_baserunning

BR has the numbers available.

[PitchingWinsGames]

i like the idea but i doubt they would make those changes to how obp and slg is calculated to include cs and sb. And without that they would not be calculated into ops.

It is just another number to look at when statistically evaluating a players number and in math theory it makes sense to do this but people don't like to rank sb to such an importance.

Well that's part of my problem... why SHOULDN'T SBs be factored into SLG? If a guy gets a single and steals second, it's not quite as good as an outright double, but it's also better than a single and related, specifically, to the batter's skill set, no differently than LoMo's ability to drive the ball into gaps.

That being said, for this to "really" work, the SB and CS values would have to be weighted, but I'm not sure I would know where to begin with that. I'd imagine I'd have to start with a run expectancy chart.
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I don't think they do, I think it's a seperate number.

That's why there are CS, PO, and POCS for when you get picked off and run.
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http://www.baseball-reference.com/pl...ng_baserunning

BR has the numbers available.

Hmm, well, I guess if they're that available, they can be fixed in some way. But math isn't my specialty and like I said, everything would still have to be properly weighted.

But this is a number I made to be based on simplicity, there are "bigger, better" numbers that quantify this stuff already, aren't there?
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Also, the thing about "taking the extra base" is that it also relies a bit on someone else to make happen... SB is more of a "batter vs pitcher/catcher" type situation that is more similar to the other OPS outcomes, BB/H/HR/etc

But that's not to say it doesn't work equally well, because Im sure it does.

[nny]

wOBA on fangraphs includes SB/CS

I personally much prefer a separate base running stat that then includes things like ability to go from first to third/home, etc, aka, EqBRR on BP

[PitchingWinsGames]

Well, like I thought, it's somewhere else, I was just kind of wondering aloud why it wasn't in OPS like I said about Rickey Henderson

the EqBRR stuff is probably too much for me, though

[nny]

To use Ricky for example, he has a 145 wRC+ compared to 127 OPS+

to give example of current day
Carlos Ruiz = .847 OPS = 128 OPS+
Jayson Werth = .921 OPS = 145 OPS+