Nice work Jeremy! Did you look at this using any of Dan Fox's baserunning metrics from BPro?

Jeremy - the A's have used the idea of the designated runner before: the famed Herb Washington, who finished his career with 31 steals (in 48 attempts), 33 runs, and exactly ZERO plate appearances. They did win the Series in '74, but check those postseason numbers... in a short series, where swinging even one game can be huge (as the Roberts steal was), the impact of such a player should be greatest.

Matt, I do like the baserunning metric on BP, but they currently only have years dating to 2007, so I decided to forego it.

Nightfly, I think I heard of a sprinter being used as a designated runner before. He was picked off his first time on base, right? I wonder whether having a baserunning specialist, fielding specialist, or LOOGY is most beneficial.

it's worth noting that Matt Holliday was in fact OUT AT THE PLATE, but the blown call allowed the Rockies to advance (and continue their unprecedented streak)

Right, but if I recall correctly he wasn't tagged out either.

And was that throw by Giles that bad? He might have the worst arm of any right-fielder in the game, and he got a lot of heat for not gunning down Holliday, but the throw was so accurate I kind of think it wasn't that bad. Definitely one of the most exciting games I've ever seen.

You have to remember that the value of good baserunning is already covered - albeit indirectly and accidentally by most overall offensive measures (ones that don't take situations into account) because the singles and doubles of good baserunners are not as valuable as the singles and doubles of bad baserunners because the latter do more to advance baserunners.

This obviously isn't a great way to measure anything, but you can't just say that a good baserunner is undervalued by his runs created,
equivalent runs, etc. without taking this into account.

I did a study a long time ago to see if good baserunning teams were undervalued by sabermetric stats, and the answer was that they don't appear to be. So the value of baserunning is already baked into these stats, although it may not be apportioned correctly.

Greg,

I'm not sure I follow why base hits by good baserunners are not as valuable as base hits by bad baserunners. Why would one do more to advance baserunners than the other?

If runs created, equivalent runs, etc. don't account for baserunning, then they are not capturing a player's total offense. It's perfectly possible that a player can be overrated while being a solid baserunner, but that's beside the point.

Baserunning isn't a big enough part of the game to make a significant difference in the difference between's a teams expected runs and runs created, as random statistical variance would almost certainly outweigh it. But conceptually, I don't quite understand how it's possible that a statistic that doesn't include baserunning would be able to properly value a good baserunning team.

Jeremy - Because dosingles and doubles by good baserunners don't advance baserunners as much as singles and doubles by bad baserunners. Ichiro will make a double out of some hits into the outfield that Adam Dunn only gets a single out of, but the runner on first is going to likely advance the same number of bases in both cases. This is most true for players who get a lot of infield/bunt hits, which rarely advance baserunners more than one base. Mike Piazza's average single advances baserunners a lot more than Luis Castillo's average single. But both are counted as having the same value in RC, EQA, LW, etc.

So while these stats don't include the value of good baserunners' baserunning, they overvalue good baserunners' hits.

Greg

Greg,

I'm not sure I follow. Baserunning is an independent skill from hitting. Arguing that Mike Piazza's singles are more valuable than Luis Castillo's singles is an entirely logical argument, and the case that power hitters are systematically undervalued by a linear weights approach is very thought-provoking and intuitively correct, I don't see the connection to baserunning. The three examples of terrific baserunners I used were Carlos Beltran, Matt Holliday, and Ichiro Suzuki. That's a very diverse set of players, and I don't see how each one of their run production could be systematically overvalued. I think your syllogism
that good baserunners are light hitters, light hitters have singles that are overvalued, so good baserunners' singles are overvalued is not appropriate, since there's no causation between baserunning and being a light/power hitter.

Also, the two measures for team performance I used were runs and clutch score, which account for any type of run production and accurately measure any type of hits that lead to runs.

Jeremy - I wasn't referring to the measures you used later in the article, just the general statement from earlier in the article.

Anyway, a common thread of players who get infield hits is that they are generally good baserunners. You don't get many infield hits if you are a slow baserunner. There are other factors, of course - right-handed batters get more infield hits, batters who hit a lot more ground balls get more infield hits - but speed, which is obviously a huge factor in baserunning, is probably the most important factor. The same thing goes for doubles that advance a baserunner on first to third instead of home. A good baserunner will have a greater percentage of doubles that advance a runner on first only to third instead of home than a bad baserunner. because a good baserunner is more likely to get to second on the same batted ball that gets a bad baserunner to first.

I don't ordinarily post simple "me too" remarks, but I want to strenuously agree with Greg's position. Analyses of decades' worth of data by analytic means shows--to me, at least--that the advantages of speed, such as they may be, are already "built into" any decent run-production equation, notably, as Greg says, in the extra bases. You can see 1138 team-seasons, MLB for 1954 through 2001, graphed by one methodology at http://highboskage.com/GRAPHICS/RUNPRED.GIF; there is no explicit "speed" component in the equation, and in fact overall accuracy hardly matters if we omit SB/CS data.

Fair enough. I didn't know that you were referring to cases of individual players, but now I see what you're saying. Pretty much an "empty" RC/EQA. That makes sense. I might look into that. Compare something like fangraphs' RE24 to wRAA and see whether theres a systematic difference between the types of players based on speed or other traits. Sorry I didn't understand your point before.

Eric, I'm having a tough time understanding how a system that doesn't account for baserunning would properly weigh it. The regression model will create a nice line of best fit, since getting on base and hitting for power are by far more important than baserunning, but if baserunning is properly accounted for, wouldn't that be incidental? There would still be omitted variable bias.

My plan is to regress baserunning and a predicted measure of runs (Can the linear weights method of wRC be accepted?) against runs. I believe that my hypothesis is that good baserunning will add to the predicted runs, as it is not accounted for in the model, while you say that it will subtract from predicted runs, as it has already been adjusted for?

I hope I'm representing the argument correctly here.

agreed that Jamie Carroll's fly ball to right was huge...Holliday scoring that run off of Hoffman on the extra day of the regular season was just enough to bump my opposition's ERA above mine and I won my Fantasy League on that call at the plate...

Jeremy - sorry for the late reply. Herb Washington is the guy you're thinking of, I'm almost certain of it.

Alright, I did some rough tests. Adding the baserunning metric does indeed increase the accuracy of run estimators of wRC, though a change of an r-squared from .9 to .91 isn't really significant. For each base, a quarter of a run can added or subtracted from the predicted model. The correlation coefficient between baserunning and the difference in wRC and R is .19.

So not including baserunning will at times create misestimations of players and teams, and baserunning does help explain some errors in run estimators.