Branch Rickey's batting stat is highly correlated with wOBA

The stat that Branch Rickey introduced in 1954 was 

 

OBP + .75*ISO

 

Where ISO is isolated power or SLG - AVG. See GOODBY TO SOME OLD BASEBALL IDEAS. From now on I will just call this stat Rickey.

 

Tom Tango created wOBA (Weighted On-Base Average). Here is one version of the formula

 

wOBA = 

 

(0.690×uBB + 0.722×HBP + 0.888×1B + 1.271×2B + 1.616×3B + 2.101×HR) 

 

divided by 

 

(AB + BB – IBB + SF + HBP) 

 

uBB means unintentional walks. The coefficients on the events in the numerator vary slightly from year to year. 

 

To find the correlation (or a correlation) between Rickey and wOBA, I looked at all players who had 2,000+ PAs from 2021-2026. There were 184 players in this group. The correlation was .970.

 

This graph shows the relationship. Rickey is on the horizontal axis. wOBA is on the vertical axis.

 

Technical notes: For the wOBA coefficient values, I used the simple average for the years 2021-2026 from Fangraphs. For OBP, I took IBBs out of the equation. All data is from Baseball Reference and Fangraphs.

 

For further information: 

The Beginner’s Guide To Deriving wOBA by Neil Weinberg of FanGraphs.

 

Guts! This has the annual coefficients for wOBA from FanGraphs

 

Was wOBA Actually Invented Nearly 100 Years Ago? This is another article from FanGraphs. Discusses the work of Baseball Magazine editor F.C. Lane. He came up with values for batting events that were close to what we see with linear weights.