Judge: The performance case for DRC+
From SABR member Jonathan Judge at Baseball Prospectus on December 3, 2018:
One of our statistical themes this year has been batting offense. We started by explaining the need for proper benchmarks and evaluated various Statcast metrics on their performance. We updated and revisited a debate between two offensive metrics, wOBA and OPS. We then discussed at length the concept of a player’s “expected contribution” and how it underlays our concept of “deserved runs.”
Today, that progression reaches its peak with the introduction of Deserved Runs Created, which we will publish under the moniker “Deserved Runs Created Plus,” or DRC+. DRC+ is essentially the flipside of Deserved Run Average (DRA): it involves similar models and extractions but is designed and grouped to track batter performance rather than pitcher performance.
Park-adjusted offensive baseball statistics are often presented on a “100” scale using a “plus” moniker that indicates higher values are better. Thus, just as we have DRA- as our scaled-to-100 statistic for pitchers (lower is better), we now have DRC+ as our scaled-to-100 statistic for hitters (higher is better). DRC+ exists for any season with reliable play-by-play data, from 1921 to the present.
Read the full article here: https://www.baseballprospectus.com/news/article/45383/the-performance-case-for-drc/
Originally published: December 6, 2018. Last Updated: December 6, 2018.