Library Update: Offense (Off)
One of the great things about FanGraphs is the ever increasing number of stats and features available on the site. One of the downsides of that is that if you miss the initial announcement, things can get awfully confusing awfully quickly. In my efforts to update and expand the FanGraphs Library, I noticed a number of stats that slipped through the cracks and failed to get their own entries after debuting on the site. Today, we are correcting one of those absences.
One of our most prominently displayed statistics is Offense, or Off if you’re checking out the leaderboards or player pages. We rolled Off and Def out about a year ago as simple combinations of stats we already offered on the site, but if you weren’t hanging out on FanGraphs in mid-September 2013, you might not have known what they meant. Off is simply batting and base running runs above average added together and tells you about a player’s total offensive value relative to league average. It is a cumulative stat, so it is based on the quality and quantity of your performance. To learn more, check out the new entry in the Library.
As always, feel free to contact me on Twitter @NeilWeinberg44, in the comments, or during my weekly chat at 3pm eastern on Wednesdays with any and all FanGraphs and stat related questions.
Neil Weinberg is the Site Educator at FanGraphs and can be found writing enthusiastically about the Detroit Tigers at New English D. Follow and interact with him on Twitter @NeilWeinberg44.
What is the formula for park adjusting wRAA?
Ah yes, I’m waiting on Appelman to verify it for me before I put it in print. Stay tuned.
When will pitching fWAR be updated? My understanding is that you guys have started including leverage (http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/war-and-relievers/) in your WAR calculations but can’t find any reference to it in the glossary. If that’s missing then are other things missing also?
Thanks
The WAR entries are going to be updated in the not too distant future. Don’t have an exact date, but it will be within the next month or so, hopefully. It’s a big project because you have to synthesize a lot of information into one entry and it made sense, to me at least, to update the building blocks first.
Leverage is included in reliever WAR. I also to not believe the entry mentions that we treat infield flies like strikeouts now, but there was an annoucement about that when it happened.
Either way, there will be a full update well ahead of next year and hopefully before the WS is over.
At the team level, does ‘Off’ include the positional adjustment?
No. You wouldn’t need a positional adjustment at the team level and that’s not what Off calculates. Positional adjustments are included in Def.
I was thinking you’d still need a positional adjustment to account for AL/NL DH issues, and that you wouldn’t want it to be in ‘Def’ at the team level because pitcher vs. DH doesn’t affect the team’s defensive value.
You adjust for run environment, but you don’t adjust away the DH position offensively. You dock them defensively.