RLOB, OPS and RS

by jscape2000 on Jun 7, 2008 11:57 AM EDT

I've cross posted this over at Pinstripe Alley.

The Yankee radio announcers, John Sterling and Susan Waldman, are obnoxiously ignorant, and lately they've been ranting about how the Yankees just can't seem to drive any runners in.

Go here for a clearer picture of the chart, sorry about the image quality...

I started off charting % of baserunners scored against team slugging percentage, and I found a nearly direct relationship. This makes perfect sense, right? It takes 3 singles to score a run, 2 doubles, or one homer- so the higher the SLG, the higher the % of runners driven in.

So then the question that matters is how good is the team at getting on base?

By taking the average of %Scored for the last three seasons I solved for x, which is .503 in this sample.

Here's my question: Is this even valid? Am I just using circular logic, proving what I wanted to question? Is there some way to test this?

If I'm right and thinking about this is worthwhile, I feel like it's another way to evaluate the weight of OBP and SLG.

I'd be really grateful to anyone who can suggest tweaks to the equation or the methodology, or who has access to a computer based Baseball Encyclopedia who can run larger samples.

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First thoughts

Do you mean driving in runs or scoring runs? it seems that a team with a high SLG is going to score a lot of runs (and someone has to drive them in), due to the fact that a team with a high SLG is also likely to have a high OBP (get a lot of runners on base). Perhaps the better look at how the Yankees are doing in terms of actually driving runners home is to look at their expected RBI rates based on the situations they’ve faced.

http://mvn.com/mlb-stats

by pizzacutter on Jun 7, 2008 3:27 PM EDT reply actions