Moving the Ball Forward

Just wanted to create a link to this BP Unfiltered post by Nate Silver related to my baserunning framework. As Nate says, the numbers for both major and minor leaguers will be in this year's Baseball Prospectus and it'll be nice to see them included in things like PECOTA and perhaps someday in measures that reflect total player performance.

The correlations that Nate mentions are similar to what I found in the past and Nate is right in removing EqSBR from the picture if you want to look soley at baserunning, as opposed to basestealing, skill. Using a rate statistic is also appropriate since the number of opportunities does vary considerably, although of course it can't account for the quality of those opportunities. That's the reason I typically use a rate statistic based on the ratio of runs to expected runs (the difference being the metrics like EqHAR etc.) and then simply use a cutoff for the number of opportunities (or times on base would work as well).

In any case, it's gratifying to see this work being systematized and calculated for both historical seasons and during the season.