My New Statistic

Lets tear ourselves away from last night's Camden Damnin' in Baltimore.  Just for as long as it takes you to consider a new statistic I have come up with.  I can't be sure that somebody hasn't come up with it already, but it measures the difference between a player's on-base percentage and their batting average by subtracting the batting average from the OBP.  I call it On-Base Percentage - Batting Average Differential, or OBP-BAd, which follows along the lines of how some statistics are abbreviated in Baseball Prospectus.  This probably closely mirrors the difference between a player's batting average and his Secondary Average, mentioned in Feeding the Monster and The Baseball Encyclopedia as a stat that measures other ways that a player gets on base besides hits.  A few examples of my new statistic (all 2011 season figures) and what each indicates about the player:

PLAYER                            BA-OBPd             INDICATION
Mark Reynolds                     .102                       The stat is amazing,,,Reynolds struck out 196 times this                  year over 620 plate appearances, and still managed to put up an OBP more than 10 percent better than his batting average.

Carlos Pena                          .132                        Despite striking out a ton, he walks a lot and hits for power.  This statistic shows just how good a hitter can be even if he is hitting close to .200, or below, like last season.

Jacoby Ellsbury                    .055                        Jacoby Ellsbury may hit for a very high average and for stupendous power, but he doesn't get on base as much as his average would suggest.  This makes him slightly overrated; people don't realize that power comes with strikeouts in Ellsbury's case.  He struck out 98 times in 2011, while walking just a bit more than 50 times.

Dustin Pedroia                      .080                        Pedey's OBP has dropped considerably in September, all the way down to .387 from around .400 in parts of August.  In September, his OBP dropped with his AVG, which leads one to believe he walks less when he's slumping in the hitting department.  This may call for an adjustment on his part.

Stay tuned for more OBP-BAd statistical publications and charts that will show players' improvements and downgrades in the statistic.


Sources: Feeding the Monster by Seth Mnookin and Baseball Prospectus and The Baseball Encyclopedia (Fourth Edition Revised), baseball-reference.com