| The thing is though, runs scored and runs allowed actually give a pretty good indication of how good a team is, and this stat generally does a good job of telling you who's good and who's not.
I think I've mentioned before a stat called Pythagorean Winning Percentage. It's a stat that estimates how good a team is. You take the number or runs scored, square it, then divide it by runs scored squared plus runs allowed squared, and the resulting percentage gives you a team's "expected" winning percentage. It generally has a very high correlation with actual winning percentages.
Where it comes in handy is seeing which teams kinda got lucky, and which teams got unlucky, or which teams are likely to fall apart and which are likely to make a charge. For instance, through much of last year, the Nationals were in first place although they had allowed more runs than they had scored. Looking at their Pythagorean %, you could assume that they would cool down, and sure enough, they did. Same thing with the Reds this year.
And, if you look at the stats, look who the top AL players are: Hafner, Johan, Jeter, Sizemore, Halladay, Ortiz, Dye. Anybody could tell you that those guys had the best years this year. But where this stat comes in handy is the middle of the pack players. Like, most people don't know who Mark Teahan is, but you can look at these standings and say "Holy shit...this guy is pretty good!"
And while I agree that not all hits/home runs/runs are created equal, the only way to really quantify it would be to go through the play-by-play data and assign a value to every single situation the player was in. That's way too difficult. This stat attempts to give you a thorough analysis of a player's year, with relative simplicity to calculate, since all you really need to know are the hard stats (OBP, SLG, SB, CS...I'm not sure what else goes into the formula).
Also, notice how A-Rod is WAY below Ortiz, Dye, Jeter, and the other MVP candidates, which is indicative of his poor season (by his abnormally high standards) |