Before I begin, I'd like to offer a brief apology for a couple of my more recent articles, which have lacked substance, crispness, and clear typing. I should spend a bit more time writing these things because it has pained me to look back on some of the past things I've written. I've been bogged down with lots of other things, so my work here is inferior to what the readership should expect.
I'm quite happy with the new additions to the site, though; they're certainly helping pick up the slack.
So, Roger Clemens deserved the Cy Young this year, but he didn't really deserve it last year. There's some justice in that, I guess, but the real problem is that the voters don't quite get it. So I say, let's ignore them and move on.
At a couple of points during the year, I posted some Top-10s in statistics for which you would not normally see ranked lists, and I'll do that again.
First, here's the Top 10 in Secondary Average for the season. Secondary Average looks at a player's production outside of batting average; it is (TB - H + BB + HBP + SB - CS) / AB.
1 Jason Giambi .523 2 Adam Dunn .506 3 Derrek Lee .490 4 David Ortiz .476 5 Albert Pujols .467 6 Jim Edmonds .465 7 Alex Rodriguez .464 8 Travis Hafner .453 9 Manny Ramirez .448 10 Jason Bay .446
Stathead favorite Adam Dunn reached number 2 with his .247/.387/.540 line, but Jason Giambi's Lazarus-like recovery and .271/.440/.535 line led the league by a good margin. The rest of the guys on this list, interestingly enough, will probably find their way onto more MVP ballots than the first two. Ortiz, A-Rod, Hafner, Pujols, Edmonds, and Lee are all pretty legitimate choices for the MVP. Not on that list? Andruw Jones, whose .425 Secondary Average is excellent but not among the league's best.
OK, next up is GPA2 from an article written by David Gassko on his Statistically Speaking blog. The formula I used was (2*OPS-BA)/4.71, because that came out to an average value of .260.
1 Derrek Lee .387 2 Albert Pujols .371 3 Alex Rodriguez .370 4 David Ortiz .361 5 Travis Hafner .361 6 Jason Giambi .356 7 Manny Ramirez .355 8 Carlos Delgado .353 9 Todd Helton .348 10 Jason Bay .343I was pretty impressed with the rationale behind GPA2, so I felt like sharing it with those who hadn't seen it. Derrek Lee's fantastic season came in at number one by a large margin.
Next up is mOPS+, SalB's stat, which normalizes his mOPS formula (2.2*OBP+ISO) to the league to make it have some context. The top 10 for that?
1 Derrek Lee 143 2 Jason Giambi 141 3 Albert Pujols 140 4 Alex Rodriguez 139 5 Todd Helton 137 6 Travis Hafner 136 7 David Ortiz 135 8 Carlos Delgado 133 9 Manny Ramirez 132 10 Adam Dunn 131
Finally, here's something I've been cooking up on my own, adapted from this article about Extrapolated Wins.
I used the formula given for NewTeamPA with everything adjusted to league averages, except the player's outs made. I then used the formula to determine the plate appearances that the player would have added to his team, if he had gotten a certain amount of playing time relative to the league.
Here's the formula:
OUT% = Outs/PA
LOUT% = League Outs/Total PA (approximately .673)
AvgTeamPA = LPA/30
AvgTeamOuts = LPA/30*LOUT%
PLAY% = From Prospectus, they called it PA%.
NewTeamPA = AvgTeamOuts / ((OUT%*PLAY%)+(LOUT%*(1-PLAY%)) )
aPA = NewTeamPA - AvgTeamPA
A more exact version of this and a better way to assess value would be to base the TeamPA and TeamOuts on the player's actual performance rather than on estimations. This, however, uses the league as its baseline, so it sacrifices exactness (in things like TeamPA) for average baselines.
So who led the league?
1 Todd Helton 109.7 2 Albert Pujols 105.6 3 Derrek Lee 94.2 4 Brian Giles 92.3 5 Alex Rodriguez 90.3 6 Jason Giambi 89.5 7 Jason Bay 81.2 8 David Ortiz 76.7 9 Bobby Abreu 72.4 10 Travis Hafner 71.2This is the forgotten aspect of OBP... the ability to save plate appearances for the rest of your team. I am supposed to have written an article for MetsGeek.com about how Reyes affects the team... that will be up at some point, but I used this methodology for that, as well. OBP is not just about getting on base; it's about making opportunities for the rest of your team to score runs.
At the bottom of this list is Corey Patterson and his .254 OBP. Cristian Guzman and Jose Reyes are there, too... but somtehing is messed up with my spreadsheet b/c Alberto Castillo is said to be in the area as well. He had something like 1 plate appearance all year.
This is just an estimation, but it really just looks at playing time (PA%) and how a player used it. It's certainly crude, but it has some value.