clock menu more-arrow no yes mobile

Filed under:

Sabermetric Sox

By VoxMediaUser39645

Hey there everyone, Marc Normandin here. While Randy is out of town he asked me to write a few guest articles, and said they could be about whatever I wanted. I decided since I'm one of the resident statheads for SB Nation, I'll order the Red Sox players by a few saber-stats. Let's start with Secondary Average, one many of you may be familiar with. SecAvg is meant to measure everything except batting average, and it scales along with batting average so that it is easy to understand what is good and what is not. A .300 SecAvg is good the same way a .300 BA hitter is. It also basically tells you how empty a batting average is. The formula I use:

(2B + 2* 3B + 3* HR + BB + SB - CS) / AB

SecAvg

  1. David Ortiz .401
  2. Manny Ramirez .374
  3. Trot Nixon .335
  4. Jason Varitek .330
  5. Mark Bellhorn .303
  6. Bill Mueller .282
  7. Kevin Millar .228
  8. Johnny Damon .227
  9. Edgar Renteria .202
That is among regulars. The benches SecAvg looks like this:

SecAvg Bench

  1. Doug Mirabelli .289
  2. Kevin Youkilis .288
  3. Jay Payton .279
  4. John Olerud .250
  5. Ramon Vazquez .088
Did you know the Red Sox are stealing bases at a 93% success rate as a team?

Let's now list the Red Sox hitters according to Value Over Replacement Player (VORP). The definition, straight from Baseball Prospectus Glossary:

The number of runs contributed beyond what a replacement-level player at the same position would contribute if given the same percentage of team plate appearances. VORP scores do not consider the quality of a player's defense.
  1. Ortiz 29.6
  2. Varitek 28.1
  3. Damon 25.4
  4. Ramirez 17.7
  5. Nixon 15.8
  6. Mueller 12.5
  7. Renteria 10.8
  8. Millar 5.6
  9. Youkilis 4.3
  10. Payton 4.2
VORP also works for pitchers, as we can see here:

Starters VORP

  1. Matt Clement 21.9
  2. Bronson Arroyo 9.1
  3. Tim Wakefield 8.8
  4. David Wells 8.0
  5. Wade Miller 2.5
Relievers VORP
  1. Mike Timlin 16.9
  2. Mike Myers 5.4
  3. Keith Foulke 0.3
  4. Matt Mantei -1.0
  5. John Halama -4.8
  6. Alan Embree -6.1
All I have to say is thank whatever you consider to be holy that we have Matt Clement and Mike Timlin.

Marc Normandin writes for Beyond the Boxscore, Baseball Digest Daily, and Sox on Deck. You can e-mail him with comments, criticism, or suggestions at normandinm@merrimack.edu

More From Over the Monster