David Gassko at The Hardball Times put up a suberb article today dealing with "Pitching Runs Created". In short, the idea is that this statistic can be used to compare hitters "Runs Created" with pitchers. Is a run saved as good as a run earned? Not according to Gassko. It's a very good article, certainly worth reading.
For example:
Taking the statistic for its value, and placing it against the hitters runs created, we can deduce that
Edgar Renteria (not exactly our most prolific hitter last year) was worth about the same as Tim Wakefield in terms of Runs Created.
It doesn't sound right, but based on the stat, it works out that way. Give it a look.
Based on PRC, here's how our pitchers did in 2005, versus the rest of the AL. I've also added in PRC/9, PRC/IP, and PRC/Appearance.
Player PRC AL Rank PRC/9 PRC/IP PRC/Appearance (Start)
Wakefield 83 20 3.32 0.37 2.27
Clement 75 30 3.53 0.39 2.10
Wells 74 31 3.62 0.40 2.22
Arroyo 64 43 2.80 0.31 2.07
Timlin 61 46 6.86 0.76 0.68
Schilling 39 77 3.76 0.42 1.10
Miller 32 100 3.16 0.35 1.80
Papelbon 24 134 6.35 0.71 1.27
Myers 17 158 4.10 0.46 0.23
Foulke 15 164 2.95 0.33 0.31
Gonzales 15 165 2.41 0.27 0.48
Halama 12 181 2.47 0.27 0.36
Bradford 11 188 4.25 0.47 3.20
Embree 9 197 2.15 0.24 0.19
Dinardo 8 205 4.90 0.54 0.90
Mantei 7 209 2.40 0.24 0.18
Delcarmen 6 217 6.00 0.67 0.54
Neal 2 247 2.25 0.25 0.25
Hansen 2 253 6.00 0.67 0.60
Harville 2 257 2.57 0.29 0.23
Remlinger 1 258 1.34 0.15 0.11
Stanton, Alvarez, Cassidy, Meredith, Perisho = 0
Consider Wakefield's 3.32 PRC/9. That's not bad. Compare that to a hitter's "full-game's worth" of plate appearances.
Taking this into account and you find that Manny creates about .88 runs a game. That comes out to 4.40 over 5 days. Even over 4 games, Manny is slightly more "productive" than every 9 innings of Wakefield. Granted, it IS Manny. In this manner, only Manny, Ortiz and Damon were more productive than our most productive starter.
There's a lot of places you can go with this. Try comparing the pitchers' Runs Created/Appearance to the hitters' Runs Created/Game. Take Damon for example. He averaged 0.65 RC/G, about the same as Timlin. I'm sure there are other such correlations, but this is a start.
Speaking of Arroyo, David Appleman wrote an article on him today, also at The Hardball Times. You can find it here.
Update: Marc Normandin at Beyond the Boxscore has more here.