Earlier in the season, I was prompted by Brendan Bowes to create a statistic to solve a very basic problem: How often do teams plate their baserunners? At what percentage does a team's baserunners actually come around to score? I looked at stat sheets and came up with Potential Runs Scored Percentage(PRS%). The formula is pretty basic: Runs-HR/OBP(PA)-HR. Home runs are subtracted because we're only concerned with the percentage of baserunners who scored.
Well, you can view the April results HERE. It gave clues as to how important hitting w/RISP and scoring runs really is. Below, I have created a chart that details the PRS% for each team for the entire regular season's results.
* - Denotes team made postseason play
So as you can see, plating the runners who get on base is essential to winning games. This is not a revelation to any baseball fan, but the chart shows how it can be the difference between going to the post season and watching it on TV. Notice that only one team who finished in the bottom 15 in PRS% made the post season, and only because the Red Sox choked badly.
There are some quirks with the chart as well. For example, St. Louis plated more of their base runners than Milwaukee, but Milwaukee won the NL Central by six games. Also you can note that Boston had that epic collapse and lost the division to the Yankees and the Wild Card to Tampa. With Tampa, Boston had a +.035 PRS% over them. Then there were teams who did great in this category, and did not make the post season such as the Blue Jays, the Royals, the Indians and the Mets.
If you look at the AL, the NL and MLB average PRS%'s, they work out this way: AL - .307, NL - .287, and MLB obviously in the middle at .297. In the April chart, the White Sox were last in the AL at .264, but moved up as the season went on but not by much. The White Sox did a poor job all the way around this year at the plate. This number really just reflects how poorly they did, in a clear way. Nobody other than Konerko had 80 RBI and when Juan Pierre (50) is fourth on your team in RBI, you know that you have a serious problem hitting w/RISP.
Now look at the Cardinals and Texas World Series. How important was PRS% in Game 5? Cardinals had second and third in consecutive innings late in the game and failed to score. Pujols was IBB'd three times and the Cards didn't take advantage of having the base runner, since he never scored a run last night. Holliday struggled, leaving five men on base. Freese was also guilty, leaving five also. Punto left four. The Cardinals left 22 on base. The Rangers weren't much better but got the hits when it counted, even if due to Tony LaRussa's bullpen mishap.
So looking at the PRS% for just Game 5, the Cardinals were .109 and the Rangers plated .181. If the Cards don't plate their runners, they can't expect to win. If the Rangers give them free runners, they have to score them plain and simple. Coming into the series, every commentator and internet poster I saw/read said that the Rangers would simply homer their way to victory. However, it has clearly become about plating the runners who reach base. Oh and intentionally walking Pujols so he can't kill the Rangers, which kind of made me angry last night. Everything's bigger in Texas, except their balls apparently.
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