From the Booth #3: Big Red Advanced Stats

This is the third post in a six post series featuring the Cornell At Bat broadcasting team. These posts will appear throughout the Fall semester. For part one of the series, click here. For part two, click here. 

Here at Cornell At Bat, we are devoted to delivering the Big Red fans with the  latest and most in-depth analysis of the baseball team. This year, analyzing statistics will be at the forefront of my duties with Cornell At Bat. Sabremetrics, or advanced stats, have taken the baseball world by storm over the past few years, especially after Michael Lewis’ book Moneyball and the film that followed it. However, advanced analysis  of NCAA baseball has little to no existence. I thought it would be interesting to preliminarily derive one of the most basic and popular sabre stats for the Big Red: WAR, or Wins Above Replacement.

WAR attempts to assess the overall value of a team’s players compared to the average player (the replacement). Batting WAR attempts to minimize the habit of simply looking at traditional and less valuable stats, such as AVG and RBIs, in an effort to get the most accurate assessment of a player’s talent and value. WAR is at the forefront of analyzing MLB players and their success. This has especially been seen with the debate of the American League MVP, where proponents of Mike Trout receiving the award claim that he has the highest WAR of any player in recent years. Determining WAR for an NCAA team is a lot harder however, for certain statistics that equate to a very precise WAR do not exist. My WAR for the Big Red is a very rough and basic form, as the stat really isn’t developed for anything besides MLB at the moment. Stats like park adjusted stats for average OBP and SLG don’t exist for the NCAA, and neither do other advanced stats that would make the calculations more precise.

My calculations for the Big Red WAR values were accomplished using an online calculator. For the calculator, I needed to input the critical stats for WAR of the average, replacement player (OBP and SLG). I used the averages from the whole Ivy League for the 2012 season for this facet. I then inputted individual stats from the Big Red team last year for all of the other categories, as well as the players’ positions (certain positions have higher values). For fielding and base running, they ask for a scale from best to worst, and I came to conclusions using fielding percentage and steals/ caught stealing percentages. I compared each player’s stats against each other to come up with the scale.

Although not completely precise, these WAR values will still accurately assess the players’ values. Also included is RAR (Runs Above Replacement), which is the sum of all the run components (Batting, Fielding, and Base Running). WAR is derived from RAR by dividing it by a runs per win constant, which is standardly set at 10/game for MLB (I couldn’t change this, but if I eventually calculate the Ivy League’s runs per win, I can redo the computations). Here are the WAR and RAR values for the 2011-2012 Big Red:

Returning members with over 20 games played, in order of most valuable to least:

 Brenton Peters: 1.6 WAR, RAR 15.8

 Chris Cruz: 1.5 WAR, RAR 15.2

 Ben Swinford: 0.6 WAR, RAR 6.1

 Tom D’Alessandro: 0. 6 WAR, RAR 6.0

 JD Whetsel: 0.1 WAR, RAR 1.0

 Kevin Tatum: -0.1 WAR, RAR -0.8

 Matt Hall: -0.2 WAR, RAR -2.0

Departing Starters, in order of most valuable to least:

Brian Billigen: 2.6 WAR, RAR 26.6

Brandon Lee: 1.2 WAR, RAR 12.2

Frank Hager: 1.0 WAR, RAR 10

Marshall Yanzick: 0 WAR, RAR 0.2

For more information about this post, please contact Alex Garcia at asg232@cornell.edu. 

For more information on Cornell At Bat or if you want to get involved, contact Alex Gimenez email at ajg322@cornell.edu. For previous Cornell At Bat adventures, look here, here, here, here, and here.  

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