I have spent the last eight weeks taking an online course from the company, Sports Management World Wide. The class, Baseball GM and Scouting game me a new perspective as to how to look at the game as a member of the front office and as a scout. I will be referring to this class for weeks to come.
This class made me thinks about different things. I had to scout high school players for their future worth as a player. I had to evaluate statistics and judge and compare existing major leaguers. I learned more than I would and I had a really good time doing it. Each week, I had to write different papers. Some of them I am proud of. So, when appropriate, you may seem some of these papers re-written for you here as they are all about baseball and that is my specialty.
After spending the last few weekends watching football, the biggest conversation was about Quarterback Rating. Did Eli outperform Brett? Did Tom have a rating better than that of Philip? I thought about it for a second and realized there was no standardized rating for a hitter. I wanted to come up with that statistic, “Hitter Rating”.
Sifting through all of the various baseball statistics, I have found four different ones that are solely based upon the hitter’s ability. I did want to consider speed. Speed may be a factor that should be considered, but speed does nothing for the ability to hit a baseball. Base running is not considered, although how well a player runs the bases can a factor in scoring runs. Stolen bases were not counted and no other statistics were considered that included non-actual hitting statistics. I did not want equivalent or adjusted statistics. I used the actual ones. The four I used were:
Batting Average = Hits/At Bats
Isolated Power = (Slugging Percentage – Batting Average)
Runs Produced = Runs + Runs Batted In – Home Runs
OPS (On Base plus Slugging Percentage) = On Base Percentage + Slugging Percentage
Now, instead of adding up the numbers and getting a number that is irrelevant (like the 158.3 of the Quarterback Rating), I wanted the “average hitter” to have a Hitter Rating of 1.00. To do this I had to do two things. First, I needed the hitter’s statistic in terms of a percentage compared using Online Percentage Calculator to their specific league average. I picked league average (American or National) instead of Major League Averages as the two leagues are different. I divided each of the four statistics above statistic by the league average to get the hitter’s ratios for the above stats. Second, I needed to come up with an equation so that the Hitter Rating would equal one if the hitter had the actual league average in all four of the categories.
I looked at the four statistics above and realized that they do not all carry the same weight when reviewing a players ability. The OPS allows us to better understand a hitter’s ability when compared to batting average. While the batting average is only the number of hits divided by the at-bats, the OPS is a combination of the slugging percentage (total bases divided by at bats) and on base percentage (hits plus balks plus hit by pitches divided by plate appearances). So the OPS would need more weight in my equation that batting average.
I always personally liked the Runs Produced statistic. The statistic shows the ability of a hitter to drive in runs and to score runs. The home runs are removed so that a home run is not counted twice (you get an RBI (minimum) and a run scored with every home run). Runs are a category that is a function of getting on base (on base percentage). Runs batted in is slightly overrated as a hitter’s tool because it is a function of the hitting ability of the people who batted before. So, in my equation calculation, runs produced will not have as large of a percentage of 1 as the other two statistics so far. To calculate the league average of runs batted in, I have made the assumption of assuming that each team has 13.5 hitters (11.5 pitchers per team) when calculating the league average.
Isolated power is a good statistic to measure a hitter’s ability for raw power. It shows the hitter’s ability to hit extra base hits and home runs. This statistic is a very good indicator of pure power. This category ranks in importance a little higher runs produced.
Therefore here is how I have assigned percentages to my equation:
Batting Average – 25%
Isolated Power – 17.5%
Runs Produced – 20%
OPS – 37.5%
And the final equation looks like this:
Hitter’s Rating = .25 (BA/lg BA) + .175 (ISO/lg ISO) + .2 (RP/lg RP) + .375 (OPS/lg OPS)
Using these equation, I have the ratings for the following hitters as an example from the 2007 statistics (baseball reference and espn.com for statistics) (average = 1.00)
Albert Pujols – 1.41
Alex Rodriguez – 1.67
Jose Uribe (SS – CWS) – 0.93
Felipe Lopez (SS – WSH) – 0.90
Who else would you like to see the ratings of?
