Scoring Baserunners

[Mass Haas]

Sabermetrics isn't my normal cup of tea, but the gentleman obviously put some effort in here, and the Brewer slant makes it more interesting, so I'll link for those who normally gobble up this type of stuff:

 

Scoring Baserunners in the NL: 2007

[sbrylski]

I'm not sure what his conclusion is supposed to be. More runs you score the better chance you have to win? Nothing in this "study" has anything correlating to anything, except percentage of baserunners scored to playoff contention, which isn't a shocker. The only one's out of line are obviously because of pitching (Pit, Ari).

 

To be fair, it looks like just part one. We'll see what he says in his follow up.

[TooLiveBrew]

"Though I took out runs scored by the batters who hit home runs, I didn't take out the runs scored by baserunners on home runs."

 

Ok, I'm sorry to begin by talking about something negative, but this makes no sense to me. If you're going to elaborate that it's important to see how well teams score without the HR, why would you somehow credit a team with these 'magic runs' that were somehow created without the HR that, in reality, drove them in.

 

Though I appreciate the ingenuity behind an article/study such as this, I don't get the whole fascination with the 'Offense without HRs' thing. I would never try to argue that one team hitting a ton of 2Bs was somehow some anomaly that you should remove in evaluating their offense. Why should HR be any different?

 

To me, offense is inherently really, really simple. Get guys on base, runs will follow. Anything that attempts to suggest things contrary to this... ie. 'get guy on base, waste 3 outs trying to get him to 3B using two outs'... just seems odd to me.

 

Honestly, the logic applied here (& I don't mean this in a demeaning way to the author, just in the mathematical sense of 'logic') would show that you should evaluate offenses by screening out singles, or BBs, or groundball outs, or GIDPs, or strikeouts... it just doesn't make sense to me to try to look at how a team scores runs by taking out HRs.