It's been a while since I have posted anything. I doubt you, the readers, have noticed, but Marc has and he's gone so far as to start pitching me topics. He suggested I take a look at the candidates for Rookie of the Year.
It turns out that's fabulously boring. Taveras of the Astros has a large lead in WARP that is primarily thanks to his excellent defense. I get the sense that nobody cares about his defense and that he won't win the award. That really only leaves Jeff Francoeur who will come the closest to reaching similar WARP levels and in much less time. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you your Rookie of the Year: Jeff Francoeur.
Great idea, Marc. That was a thrilling topic.
Two paragraphs down and I was done. That left a couple of options: rip Marc's idea for an article, or steal one of his good ideas and tweak it. I've decided to go with the latter. Specifically, I'd like to take a look at Marc's fantastic NRAA.
NRAA, or Net Runs Above Average, is a neat tool. My only problem with it is that I detest the use of MLV. It is painful to use and tends not to correlate as well with runs scored as, oh say, Equivalent Runs. Equivalent Runs also have the aesthetic appeal of sharing the same creator as our defensive stat of choice, Rate2. Those of you aware of NRAA and EQR are probably thinking, "Hey, EQR isn't an 'Above Average' stat!" Right you are, but that's easily remedied.
League Average EQA is always .260 and EQR are derived from EQA. Thus, by the magic of grade school math, we can determine EQRAA. The simple equation?
EQR - (5 * OUT * .0344693719) = EQRAA
And so that it's a per 100 game stat:
EQRAA/GP*100 = EQRAA/100
See? It really is like magic (in the same sense that not eating is magic). The run scoring prediction system of Equivalent Runs correlates more closely with runs scored than Marginal Lineup Value and would seem to justify the extra work that is undoubtedly going to be done by an Excel spreadsheet, anyway.
I'm interested to hear what you all think of moving to EQR.