Total Run Accounting - Teams, Players and "tORA"

Since I posted the first overview of "Total Run Accounting" here, I have posted a couple of analyses over at Twinkie Town. Over here at BtB, some of you may be interested in the initial results, considering my first post focused on the method behind the madness.

First, I focused on a team's ability to do the "little things", noting that the Minnesota Twins grade out as over 40 runs better than MLB average at what I'm considering to be the "little things", directional hitting and baserunning.

"Total Run Accounting", or The Value of Doing the "Little Things"

Second, I posted an analysis of 2008 offensive performance, including a spreadsheet for all 1,038 players who had at least one PA in 2008.The best in MLB at doing these "little things"? That would be Joe Mauer.

"Total Run Accounting" - 2008 Player by Player

In the second post, I describe a new statistic that I'm calling "Total Offense Run Average", or "tORA" that captures all aspects of offensive performance, including the "little things" in a rate statistic similar to wOBA.

To make them easier to find, the TRA spreadsheets are posted to Google Docs:

Team Offense 2009-01-28

Player Offense 2009-02-06

For more details, check out the Twinkie Town posts, but here's a high level overview of the player by player analysis.

"Standard Batting" RAA ranges from Albert Pujols (+68.68) to Jeff Francoeur (-38.18). Over a 100 run difference across MLB.

"Other Batting" RAA (primarily directional hitting) ranges from Bengie Molina (+8.20) to Hanley Ramirez (-7.85). Considering the range of values here, I'd peg the overall value of this directional hitting at around 10-15% of the "standard" batting above.

Baserunning RAA ranges from Willy Taveras (+13.59) to Dioner Navarro (-8.98). Again, I'd peg the overall value of baserunning at about 20% of the "standard batting" above.

Finally, opponents' fielding appears to have a possible correlation with speedy contact hitters such as Ichiro. However, other than putting the ball in play, this category is pretty much out of the batter's hands once he puts the ball in play.

Overall "little things", combining "other batting" and baserunning ranges about the same as running, from Joe Mauer (+12.86) down to Joey Votto (-8.74), with a few surprises at the top  (Ibanez, Kendrick, Bartlett) and bottom (Iwamura, Pence, Damon) of the rankings.

Introducing "tORA"

Adding all of the player's contributions in standard batting, "other" batting, baserunning and opponents fielding gives me a number of "total offense" runs, pretty much centered at zero across the league, as all is based on expected runs above and below MLB average. The general concept of tORA is to create a rate statistic that can be applied on a per plate appearance basis to capture rate of offensive run production and to calculate total runs created by the player. 

Calculating tORA is pretty simple, done in three steps.

1. Calculate total offense runs above average, per plate appearance. For Albert Pujols, this means +66.03 / 643 = 0.103.
   
2. Add a factor to account for MLB average offensive runs per plate appearance. To do this, I used the MLB team average runs scored (753) and PA (6254) and added a factor 753/6254 = 0.120 to each player's tORA.
   
3. In order to normalize tORA around the same point as wOBA (0.335), I added an additional factor of 0.214 for each player to center around 0.335.

This produces a rate statistic similar to wOBA, which captures aspects of offense such as baserunning (beyond SB/CS) and directional hitting, that are not well captured by other statistics. In the future I plan to compare wOBA and tORA, but I'm putting it out there for discussion. Thoughts?