So I was reading through Moneyball the other day and I came across this passage:
An extra point of on-base percentage was clearly more valuable than an extra point of slugging percentage - but by how much? He (Paul DePodesta) proceeded to tinker with his own version of Bill James' "Runs Created" formula. When he finished, he had a model for predicting run production that was more accurate than any he knew of. In his model, an extra point of on-base percentage was worth three times an extra point of slugging percentage.(p.128)
DePo saw that adding OBP and SLG together meant they were of equal importance. He knew this couldn't be true, that's why he created this formula. So, I have calculated this value for a handful of A's players. I call this value OPS/3 since the formula is a player's OBP plus 1/3 his SLG.
Player OBP SLG OPS OPS/3
Kendall 345 321 660 452
Johnson 355 451 806 505
Swisher 322 446 768 470
Ellis 384 477 861 543
Kotsay 325 421 746 465
Crosby 346 456 802 498
Bradley 350 484 834 511
Chavez 329 466 795 484
Payton 306 444 750 454
Kielty 350 395 745 482
Looking at these numbers, a few things jump out at me. Kendall was widely considered to have had a terrible 2005 at the plate while JayPay was praised for picking up the offense. Looking at their OPS, one could easily agree that Payton was a better hitter than Kendall this year, but if you look at their OPS/3, you see that their run production and, in turn value as a hitter is about equal. The reason for this is that OPS/3 focuses much more on OBP, and Kendall is a much more patient hitter than Payton.
I wondered what the corellation between OPS and OPS/3 was, if a player had a high OPS it meant he had a high OPS/3. I figured if the corelation was high, then this whole experiment was a waste of time. I found the r^2 to be .787 which is a poor correlation. I know, I know, small sample size, but I still think there's something to this OPS/3 stat and we SABRANers should use it along side OPS not only because it's in Moneyball, our bible, but also cuz we should use the most accurate stat possible to calculate offensive production. If it's good enough for DePo, it's good enough for me.