Stros first baseman and future Hall of Famer Jeff Bagwell played in his 2000th career game last night.
Bags has been good for so long that it is easy to take him for granted. Although he is clearly in the autumn of his career (this will likely be his fifth straight season of declining offensive numbers), Bags in decline is still better than most players.
A team wins baseball games by scoring more runs than the other team. So, the amount of runs that a player creates is the best indication of a player’s hitting ability. In that connection, sabermetricians who have studied hitting statistics over generations have concluded that two particular hitting statistics are the best indicators of how many runs that a player will create — on base average (“OBA”) and slugging percentage (“SLG”). This makes sense because players who get on base frequently (OBA) and who hit the ball hard (SLG) tend to create the most runs. OBA and SLG are combined into a cumulative statistic called “OPS,” which is OBA + SLG = OPS.
Building on these statistics, Lee Sinins, a lawyer turned sabermetrician, has developed another statistic called “runs created against average” (“RCAA”) in connection with his website Baseball Immortals and his related Baseball Sabermetric Encyclopedia, which is an excellent baseball statistical database than can be purchased through Lee’s site.
RCAA is a particularly valuable statistic to evaluate hitting because it focuses on the two most important things in winning baseball games ? that is, creating runs and avoiding making outs. RCAA basically computes the number of outs that a particular player uses in creating runs for his team and then compares that number to the amount of runs that an average player in the league would create while using an equivalent number of outs.
RCAA is computed by taking a specific player’s runs created (“RC”) statistic minus the amount of runs created that an average player would have created using the same amount of his team’s outs based on the league average and adjusted to the player’s home park. The hypothetical average hitter in the league has an RCAA of exactly zero. Thus, a player can have either a positive RCAA — which indicates he is an above average hitter — or a negative RCAA, which means he is performing below average.
For example, as you might expect, Barry Bonds led the NL and MLB last season with a positive 115 RCAA ? that is, he produced an incredible 115 more runs for the Giants than an average NL player would have created using an equivalent number of his team’s outs. On the other side of the ledger, the Stros’ Brad Ausmus was one of the five worst hitters in the NL last season, producing a horrid negative 32 RCAA, which means that he created 32 fewer runs than an average player would have created using an equivalent number of his team’s outs.
In acknowledging Bags’ milestone of playing in his 2000th game, Sinins noted the following:
After 43 RCAA/.966 OPS and 38 RCAA/.919 OPS seasons, Bagwell hit .524 SLG,
.373 OBA, .897 OPS, 21 RCAA in 160 games in 2003 and is off to a .465 SLG,
.411 OBA, .876 OPS, 9 RCAA start in his first 45 games. He has a .957
career OPS, compared to his league average of .762, and 672 RCAA in 2000 games.
Bagwell ranks 8th on the NL’s career RCAA list (since 1900)–
RCAA
1 Barry Bonds 1385
2 Stan Musial 1204
3 Rogers Hornsby 1081
4 Hank Aaron 1039
5 Willie Mays 1008
6 Mel Ott 989
7 Honus Wagner 938
8 Jeff Bagwell 672
9 Joe Morgan 657
10 Eddie Mathews 652
That’s pretty good company for Bags, who is simply the best Stros player ever.