Friday, January 30, 2015

Using Runs Above Average To Determine The Best All Around Seasons

Using the Baseball Reference Play Index, I called up the best seasons in fielding (Rfield), base running (Rbaser) and batting (Rbat). But when I called up the leaders in one category, they also had to meet some minimum level in each of the other two stats (more details at the end of the post).

To rate "all-aroundness," I used a geometric mean. For example, if a player was 10 runs better than average in all three stats, I multiplied 10*10*10 = 1000. Then I took the cube root of that, which gives us 10. The geometric mean rewards balance, so a guy with 20 in all three stats is better than someone who had 100 in batting and just 1 in each of the other two.

Here is the top 25. It seems heavily weighted to 1980-2001 (15 cases) and it seems that base running usually had to be pretty good. There were only two seasons from 1911-1960. There were 8 cases from 1996-2001, by 8 different players.


Rank Player Rfield Rbat Rbaser Year Rating
1 Rickey Henderson 13.2 47.5 17.7 1985 22.30
2 Mike Trout 21 52.5 9.8 2012 22.10
3 Eddie Collins 24 33 9.9 1910 19.86
4 Rickey Henderson 24.1 32 10.1 1989 19.82
5 Joe Morgan 13.7 54.9 10.1 1975 19.65
6 Willie Wilson 23.9 18.6 16.5 1980 19.42
7 Rickey Henderson 18 41 9.3 1980 19.00
8 Willie Mays 15.1 54.5 8.3 1958 18.97
9 Willie Mays 16.8 53.5 7.3 1964 18.72
10 Rickey Henderson 16.1 61.5 6.1 1990 18.21
11 Craig Biggio 18.7 43.5 7.2 1997 18.02
12 Alex Rodriguez 15.9 58.1 6.1 2000 17.79
13 Barry Bonds 9.9 69.8 7.8 1996 17.53
14 Darin Erstad 28.8 35.3 4.7 2000 16.84
15 Ellis Burks 12.4 47.9 8 1996 16.81
16 Larry Walker 9.6 69.6 6.6 1997 16.39
17 Ken Griffey 32.3 39.8 3.4 1996 16.35
18 Carl Yastrzemski 23.3 69.4 2.7 1967 16.34
19 Willie Mays 19.9 55.2 3.9 1962 16.24
20 Frankie Frisch 37 23.1 5 1927 16.22
21 Ichiro Suzuki 15.2 29.9 9.4 2001 16.22
22 Lenny Dykstra 25.4 29.2 5.7 1990 16.17
23 Hank Aaron 23.4 43.9 4.1 1961 16.14
24 Carl Yastrzemski 24.7 47.3 3.6 1968 16.14
25 Al Kaline 29.2 39.3 3.6 1961 16.04


Click here to see the complete rankings. After the top 50 or so, you might start to see duplicate entries. That is because as I called up these lists, some cases appeared on both of them and then I merged them all together and sorted them to get the ranking.

Criteria:

Seasons with 44.1+ batting runs, 0.1+ fielding runs, 0.1+ base running runs (197 cases)
Seasons with 0.1+ batting runs, 17.9+ fielding runs, 0.1+ base running runs (198 cases)
Seasons with 0.1+ batting runs, 0.1+ fielding runs, 5.8+ base running runs (190 cases)
Seasons with 30+ batting runs, 3+ fielding runs, 3+ base running runs (161 cases)


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Cy,
I am curious about Kaline and how close his 1955 to 1963 seasons were?
Thanks for all the interesting stats at Cybermetrics

Cyril Morong said...

Thanks for reading.

1955-11.67
1963-6.54