There are not many things more beautiful to me than a ballpark open for the first time in the spring, or a perfectly executed hit and run, or a majestic homerun that clears a park. I can always find beauty in the simplest of forms at a baseball game, and there are not many things that rival what I see at the park.
But something that tops everything on that list is my new baby girl.
I have taken the past eight weeks off from doing something I love that in the end means nothing to spend time with someone I now adore and that now means everything. Now that things are starting to get back to a normal schedule (or as normal as it will be), I hope to be able to pick back up where I left off and get back to some research.
While I will never doubt the beauty of my new daughter, beauty on the baseball field or in the box score is something that has been debated for more than a century. Specifically with statistics, as we have seen in the past, the naked eye can often lie when it comes to observing and, in turn, trying to qualify a “good” player. Everyone knows the old quote from Bull Durham about the difference between a .250 hitter and a .300 hitter:
“…one extra flare a week, a ground ball, a dying quail… you’re in Yankee Stadium.”
Essentially, it’s VERY hard to tell between a mediocre, .250 hitter and a great .300 hitter. So when fans, announcers, managers, or anyone make general statements about how hitters perform based on what they see or what they believe, it’s always best to take it with a grain of salt.
A situation like this came up towards the end of the 2007 regular season as I was watching an Astros/Brewers game in late September.
In a game that featured two of the Majors’ top rookies for the season, the announcers on Fox Sports began discussing the value that Hunter Pence and Ryan Braun had on their teams this past year. In noting that both of them had very good batting averages (Braun finished the year at .324, Pence at .322) a comment was made along the lines of “rookies will typically hit for a higher average when they arrive in the majors because the quality of the pitchers is much better in the majors and they are able to be around the plate much more than their minor league counterparts.”
I don’t have the transcript of the game in my possession, so please don’t take that word for word, but the general idea is there. That because hitters see more hittable pitches when they come to the majors, they will be better hitters when it comes to average.
So I immediately thought, can this be true? Never mind that pitchers in the majors hit their spots better and their fastballs are faster and their breaking balls have more movement. And forget that defenses are better, travel is more brutal, and playing time for rookies is usually more sporadic; does that actually translate into better stats for rookies when they are facing tougher competition? That got me thinking about 2007 and using it as a case study for rookie production in the majors vs. their minor league numbers.
These broadcasters did not qualify their statement by specifying any level of the minor leagues, so it is pretty easy to pull a list of rookies and their 2007 MLB batting averages and compare them to their minor league career averages. I chose rookies with at least 150 plate appearances so we could see hitters who at least had routine/daily at bats. Here is the list of the 55 who qualified (actually there were 56, but Akinori Iwamura has no minor league stats to work with) ranked in order of their 2007 MLB batting average:
A simple count of these rookies shows that only 14 out of 55 (or 25%) out-performed their career minor league batting averages in their first major league season. And out of those 14, four of them beat their minor league total by .005 or less. Running a simple correlation of the two sets of numbers shows that the two sides (minors and MLB 2007) are not statistically significant (with r=.191 and p=.162). Simply speaking, looking at a player’s minor league average before 2007 would not be a good way to predict or even estimate their batting averages as a major leaguer in 2007.
You will always have your studs coming out of the minors who find a way to translate that talent into almost instant success in the majors such as Ryan Braun, Hunter Pence, and Troy Tulowitzki. But does everyone remember all of the experts’ preseason Rookie of the Year, Kansas City’s Alex Gordon? He was actually being hailed as the next Mike Schmidt. But after a few benchings and a .247 average on the year, he did not receive a single vote in the category. And what about Justin Upton, Elijah Dukes, and others who were supposed to pay immediate dividends? There are plenty just like them who did not pan out as originally advertised. And not to say Gordon won’t become Schmidt….just not this year.
So, if average is not a good predictor of success from the minors to the majors, what might be? We need to look at a more cumulative offensive statistic, not just one that says, “I got this many hits in this many at-bats.”
What I want to propose is Runs Created per Game or RC/27. We are all pretty familiar with the stat Runs Created. It simply takes into account a player’s offensive production based on runs he created for himself and for others on his team and tallies it into a calculable, sum total. What RC/27 does is ask the question, “what if there was a whole lineup of X player? How many runs would that lineup score per game?” For example, in 2007, the top three in the category were David Ortiz (surprisingly first at 10.86 runs/game), Alex Rodriguez (10.49), and Magglio Ordonez (10.12). That tells you how good these guys were - can you imagine a team that would average more than 10 runs per game? The Yankees had the highest average in 2007 with 5.83 runs per game (and their best month was September at 6.67).
Anyway, RC/27 will take into account not only the runs created by the batter by themselves as well as opportunities presented to that player by teammates and how he performed in those circumstances. Using the same 55 players, here is the list of their career minor league RC/27 numbers vs. their numbers in their rookies seasons of 2007:
Running the correlation again, we see that the numbers for RC/27 comparing minors to 2007 MLB ARE statistically significant (r=.268 and p=.05). So while not perfect, Runs Created per Game would be a much more reliable stat to judge performance across levels of competition.
My guess is that this would be partially due to the fact that a player’s pure talent should eventually translate across the levels he plays in, whether good or bad, in looking at how he performs on offense individually. Average only accounts for one piece of the offensive puzzle: how many times did I get a hit in my times at bat? It doesn’t account for walks, what type of hit it was, who was on base, whether they got the hit with one out or two outs, etc.
Another theory of mine is that in the majors, these rookies will be playing and batting in a lineup of players that (should) actually belong in the majors. I imagine that would lead to more consistent opportunities of plate appearances with men on base, men in scoring position, and also competent hitters batting behind them, allowing something like RC/27 to stabilize quicker with less variance than something like average where it is solely reliant upon batter and pitcher; one at bat. But, then again, that’s just my opinion, and the topic of a whole other post with different numbers to crunch.
Unfortunately, this is a difficult study to continue to quantify. The statement proposed by the announcers about the averages in their rookie seasons qualifies the research and limits the set of data we can use for the players. Once their second year comes around, they are not rookies anymore and their MLB numbers can’t be used anymore.
But if someone wanted to take on the task of comparing the numbers from say 1986 to 2006 for rookies and see how they correlate, I would be very interested to see it. Would average then become significant over 20 years? Would RC/27 become less so? I would be curious to know.
Just be sure to always question what you hear if it doesn’t sound right to you. There’s a good chance it’s not based on facts.
And welcome back to Baseball Notes. More to come soon…
