Total Average

Another new stat I've come up with, and which I'll be keeping this year, is what I like to call "Total Average".

(I think Tom Boswell came up with something similarly-named, but his formula was different.)

Anyway, here's how you figure Total Average:

(H + BB + RBI + R - outs) divided by (AB + BB)

In other words, every hit is a point, every walk is a point, every run batted in is a point, every run is a point. For every out, you subtract a point. Then you take that total and divide by the number of at-bats plus walks.

Take Jay Atton's numbers from last season...

H   - 21

BB  -  5

RBI - 22

R   - 15

The total of those four is 63. Then you subtract his total outs, which were 18. This leaves 45.

Then you divide that 45 by the total of his at-bats and walks, which was 44.

Jay's Total Average for 2011 comes to 1.023

As you can see, the number can work out to higher than 1.000, but you can take my word for it that a 1.000 or better is rare and excellent. I've done the figures for all 17 seasons of the team's existence (I'll post all of it someday when I have the time) and in those 17 seasons there have been only 22 individual years of a .900 or better.

It is also possible to have a negative number. If a batter has had more plate appearances than the total of his good contributions, it will work out to a negative percentage. Rather than waste time figuring it exactly, I just list it as a zero. That's easy shorthand for a pretty bad year. As with the 1.000 or better year, a zero year is not easy to accomplish. There have been about the same number of them throughout the team's history.

The strength of this statistic, versus other stats, is that it takes into account not just simple numbers of hits or walks, but also how valuable those times reaching base were in context. By including the RBI and R numbers in the total, it gives an expression of clutch hitting as well as discounting 'empty' walks and hits that didn't result in any runs being scored (which is, after all, the point of the game.)

After going back and doing this stat for every season in the club's history, I've come to the conclusion that it's an extremely valuable tool for a manager. I'd say it's the single best snapshot concerning the overall value any player brought to his team, as a batter, that season - better than AVG, OB%, SLG%, OPS, or any other percentage stat. It tells you how much of those four categories (H, BB, RBI, R) you can expect, on average, from any single at-bat by that player.

It's somewhat possible to predict a score for your team if you add up the Total Averages of the guys in your line-up that day, then multiply by 2.1 (Trust me on that figure. It's basically derived from total outs in a 7-inning game, then the historic OB% for our team.) A team of ten Jays would score, on average, between 21 and 22 runs, all other things being equal.

(Of course, all other things aren't equal and that's why we actually play the games instead of just doing math on Saturday night and staying home watching the Three Stooges Sunday morning.)

Here are the Total Average numbers for 2011, for those players with at least 15 plate appearances. Of course, this is JUST one year, and a guy's TA for his career may vary significantly higher or lower. One year can always be an aberration.

Jay Atton      1.023
Fred Goodman         .920
Bill Davis           .789
Drew Atton           .731
Pat Atton            .714
Eric MacDonald       .645
Jim Sullivan         .450
Ron Johnson          .407
Emilio Zirpolo       .341
Jack Atton           .256
Joe Baszkiewicz      .114
Bobby Fallon           0