The times are gone when you could use RBIs, batting average or Wins discussing the quality of a player with your friends and co-workers (and be taken serious). Now, OPS and ERA are much more meaningful, they are easily understandable and you do not run the risk of ridicule. But they have their limitations, too, and therefore, many new statistics have been invented that are supposed to tackle those shortcomings. The only problem is that most of those are not particularly intuitive. Or can you explain from the top of your head what Win Shares, VORP and equivalent average measure? If you can, well, then this column is not for you (most of the time). Each Wednesday from now on, AHP will look at a fancy stat and what is behind it or we give you our take on something statistical that gets a lot of press (so basically, if we find something interesting, we write about that, otherwise, we pick a stat). Today, we will start with Runs Created, which was introduced by the one and only Bill James.

While many mainstream media baseball writers with MVP votes are still in love with RBIs, the shortcomings of this old school stat have been demonstrated extensively. Let me just briefly refresh your memory. First, RBIs depend to a large degree on who is hitting in front of a player, e.g. driving in many runs hitting behind speedy on-base-machines is much easier than hitting behind slow-footed team-mates with on-base-percentages south of .300. Second, RBIs are very context-dependent. Let me explain what I mean by that with a short example. Consider the following situation: The leadoff man walks, next hitter gets him to third with a double and the third hitter cashes him in with a ground out. Now, the third hitter gets the RBI and the second hitter gets nothing, even though you could make a good case that he is to a larger degree responsible for the runner coming home than the guy behind him.

Next to RBIs, there are Runs. Runs as a stat basically suffer from the same shortcomings as RBIs: They depend on who hits behind the runner and are not always given to the player most responsible for them. By the way, I have always felt that Runs are like the ugly little stepsister of RBIs. Runs do not nearly get the attention of RBIs even though a player has to actually accomplish something (i.e. circle the bases) for get an R while you can ground out weakly to first base if you are lucky enough to hit with less than two outs to get an RBI.

Anyway, we have established that RBIs and Runs are flawed stats, maybe even flawed concepts. After all, the job of a ballplayer is to put runs on the board, regardless of whether you step on home plate yourself, push someone else over or just help a runner advance a base or two. The men in the booth may say “they pay him to drive in runs” a thousand times, but even the clean-up hitter will come to bat with the bases empty more often than not and then his job is to get on base and home next, just like the lead-off man is supposed to cash in a runner from third with less than two outs. So, what counts are the numbers on the scoreboard, not the Rs or RBIs on the player’s personal stat sheet. Runs Created was developed to measure just that, how many runs a player contributes. Basically, there are two ways to help your team score runs: First by getting on base and second by advancing runners with (extra-) base hits. Does that sound familiar? That is no coincident, since the same concept is behind OPS (on base percentage + slugging percentage).

There are some differences between OPS and Runs Created however, the first being that Runs Created depends on plate appearances. OPS is a nice stat to measure hitting prowess, but a higher OPS does not necessarily mean that the player did more for his team, since a player with an OPS of .850 who had 600 plate appearances obviously helped his team score more runs than a player with an OPS of .900 who only had 50 plate appearances. So unlike OPS, which simply summates on-base-percentage and slugging-percentage, Runs Created multiplies on-base-percentage with total bases. So, the resulting formula is
Runs Created = OBP * TB.

Now where are the at-bats? To get them, we can transform the formula  to
Runs Created = OBP * SLG * AB

Next, let us first take a look at some players’ RBI, R and Runs Created scores from this season to get a little context:

Those are five of the top RBI hitters from the National League and five of the top lead-off men from the Junior Circuit. Lets see what Runs Created has to say about them:

We see that Runs Created shuffles around the leader boards quite a bit. It especially puts Ryan Howard’s 146 RBIs into perspective and corroborates what a great season Albert Pujols has had (second in the majors in on-base-percentage and first in total bases at the same time). Also, while Dustin Pedroia was indeed fabulous this year, Grady Sizemore also had another excellent season that was lost in the miserable Indians season.

Lets get back to the formula once again: RC = OBP * TB or OBP * SLG * AB. Now if we look at this version, two things become apparent. First, Runs Created is not a particularly useful stat to compare the “pure” quality of players (i.e. ignoring durability). What I mean is that a player who had an OBP of .350 and 100 total bases in 400 plate appearances was better than a player who had the same OBP and total bases in 600 appearances, although both have created the same amount of runs. A real life example: Milton Bradley has 97.2 RC in 2008, while Raul Ibanez has 108.8. However, Bradley only had 510 plate appearances to get there while Ibanez had 707. So it is safe to say that Bradley is the better player when both take the field. Now, do not get me wrong, I am not criticizing RC for that shortcoming because it was not developed to measure the quality of a player, just how many runs he contributed.

There are other, more serious shortcomings of RC – e.g. where are the stolen bases? – and many variants of Runs Created have been developed to improve it since its original proposal. But that is something for next week.

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