Computing Offensive Value

One of the hallmarks of sabermetrics are the formulas sabermetricians use to estimate the offensive constribution of individual players. Bill James first introduced such a formula (Runs Created) in the late 1970s or early 1980s in his yearly Baseball Abstract, which are among the founding documents of sabermetrics. Since that time others have picked up the banner and James himself has further refined his formulas and extended them to try and calculate not only how many runs a player has produced, but how that translates into wins. In fact, last year James published Win Shares, a somewhat controversial book that catalogs these attempts.

Well, one of the best efforts at precision in the attempts to calculate how many runs a player has produced is Extrapolated Runs (XR) developed by Jim Furtado and published in 1999.