simpleWAR in College Baseball — Iteration 2
If you haven’t read Part 1 of the simpleWAR series, go back and read it.
In Part 1 of our series in calculating simpleWAR at the collegiate level, I showed you a step-by-step guide on how to calculate a player’s Wins Above Replacement (denoted as simpleWAR) of any collegiate team (the example I used was UIC in 2024).
For Iteration 2, we will focus on solely the batting side of calculating simpleWAR. In the previous iteration, we utilized “Runs Participated In” or Total Runs (TR), which is Runs (R) plus Runs Batted In (RBI) minus home runs (HR). So, in short, it is denoted as R+RBI-HR.
While it does an okay job in getting how many runs a player was involved in offensively, it still lacks baserunning skills, which is involved in this iteration.
However, how do we involve baserunning (in some way, shape, form) at the collegiate level? There’s a lot less data available publicly on the college side than the MLB. Our only publicly available data at the college level are Stolen Bases (SB), Caught Stealing (CS), and Grounded into Double Plays (GDP). So, what metric, if any has those values baked into its formula?
Enter the technical version of Runs Created. Developed by famed sabermetrician Bill James, it factors in stolen bases, caught stealing, and double plays.
Here’s the full formula, per FanGraphs:
Where:
H = Hits
BB = Walks
CS = Caught Stealing
HBP = Hit By Pitch
GDP = Grounded into Double Play
1B = Singles
2B = Doubles
3B = Triples
HR = Home Runs
IBB = Intentional Walks
SH = Sacrifices
SF = Sacrifice Flies
AB = At-Bats
(not mentioned but will be: TB = Total Bases, PA = Plate Appearances)
Another way to write it is this:
((H + BB — CS + HBP — GDP) * ((TB + (.26 * (BB — IBB + HBP)) + (.52 * (SH+SF+SB))))) / PA
Given this formula instead of Total Runs, we can at the very least incorporate baserunning via SB, CS, and GDP.
Let’s use an example from UIC again, this time, Zane Zielinski (denoted as #7 on the UIC stats page).
We use essentially the same stats from version 1 but replace runs with runs created. Therefore, in 2024, UIC:
recorded 2259 PA
recorded 1379 Outs
created 388.21 runs (using the Runs Created formula) (will be denoted as TRC)
Therefore,
UIC’s TRC/Out = 0.282 (after rounding)
Now we follow the same formula as version 1 but instead of TR (Total Runs) we use TRC (Total Runs Created).
Zielinski recorded 268 PAs with 148 Outs.
He recorded 81 Hits (H), 32 Walks (BB), 4 Caught Stealing (CS), 7 Hit By Pitches (HBP), 4 Grounded into Double Plays (GDP), 130 Total Bases (TB), 3 Intentional Walks (IBB), 1 Sacrifice (SH), 5 Sacrifice Flies (SF), and 20 Stolen Bases (SB).
Plug all those numbers into the formula and you get 63.89 TRC.
Given he recorded 148 Outs and the team’s expected TRC is 0.2815156, he was expected to have 41.66 TRC, or 41.66 xTRC (expected Total Runs Created).
Now, I will repeat from Version 1 (again replacing TR with TRC
WAT = (TRC-xTRC)/Runs_Win = (63.89–41.66)/11 = 2.02
We now calculate “games” and Games/PA (G/PA):
“games” = Games Played * (games assigned to non-pitchers) = 55 * 4/7 = 31
Games/PA = Team PA / “games” = 2259 / 31 = 72.9
Then, we compute the Games_calc:
Games_calc = player PA / Games/PA = 268 / 72.9 = 3.67
Convert that to wins:
wins_calc = Games_calc * wins per game = 3.67 * 0.636 = 2.34
we can now compute simpleWAR Runs Created (sWAR_RC):
sWAR_RC = (WAT+wins_calc) — (replacement level * Games_calc) = (2.02 + 2.34) — (0.25 * 3.67) = 3.3 (after rounding)
In version 1 of simpleWAR, Zielinski recorded a 2.9 figure.
In version 2, Zielinski recorded a 3.3 figure, a boost of 0.4 wins just from adding baserunning data.
To make sure the math checks out, we add the “total_rcw” column and get 19.7 wins after rounding, which divided by 35 (UIC’s total wins) gets you 4/7 (the amount of games allotted to batters).
Here’s the Top 10 Gainers in the 2nd iteration of simpleWAR:
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