Statcast OAA Is Now Available on FanGraphs
The MLB Statcast fielding metric Outs Above Average (OAA) is now available on player pages in the “Advanced Fielding” section and on the leaderboards. We’ve also included the accompanying Fielding Runs Prevented metric (RAA), which is OAA converted to runs above average.
From MLB.com’s Statcast glossary:
Outs Above Average for outfielders starts with Catch Probability, which takes the distance an outfielder must go, the time he has to get there, and the direction he travels to put a percentage of catch likelihood on each individual batted ball. OAA for outfielders is the season-long cumulative expression of each individual Catch Probability play. For example, if an outfielder has a ball hit to him with a 75 percent Catch Probability — that is, one an average outfielder would make three-quarters of the time — and he catches it, he’ll receive a +.25 credit. If he misses it, he’ll receive -.75, reflecting the likelihood of that ball being caught by other outfielders.
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Outs Above Average for infielders takes the following factors into account.
- How far the fielder has to go to reach the ball (“the intercept point”).
- How much time he has to get there.
- How far he then is from the base the runner is heading to.
- On force plays, how fast the batter is, on average. (A runner’s average Sprint Speed is used in the calculation, rather than his Sprint Speed on that particular play. For new players with no data, a league-average — 27 ft/sec — score is used; once the player qualifies for the leaderboard, all of his previous plays are re-run.)
You can read more about Outs Above Average here, Fielding Runs Prevented here, with further details available on Baseball Savant.
David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.
Awesome! Any chance you can show the “success rate added” column as well? Think it’s helpful to see the rate stat as well to compare players with different amounts of playing time.
Seconded. Or, alternately, if they could add a stat that normalizes OAA by innings like UZR/150 does.
YESSSSSSSS
Infield OAA is a lot closer to the metrics that teams use, so I’m super pumped about this.
Thank you so much
Gracias, tremendo aporte.
yay! glad to see. frankly I think fWAR should’ve switched away from using UZR a while ago
If fWAR was using OAA, Nicky Lopez (pictured above) would have had 5.5 fWAR last year….and still would have been runner-up to Cedric Mullins for the 2021 breakthrough player of the year (6.8 fWAR).
The big problems with OAA are:
(1) Outfield ratings don’t include throwing, which is important
(2) The scale of OAA is quite expansive (much like DRS), and would substantially change the ratio of value from offense to defense.
In theory, you could just use UZR’s arm rating and rescale OAA so it’s got roughly the same scale as UZR. That would probably be better, but since it’s off-label use it’ll probably take more time to study.
Why exactly *should* there be rescaling? UZR’s less knowledgeable than DRS or OAA in terms of fielding, albeit not throwing for the latter. How do we know that UZR’s agnosticism is actually an accurate representation of the offense/defense value ratio?
I don’t believe it needs to be rescaled. RAA is closer in distribution to UZR than it is to DRS when looking at only the range component.
That’s a neat chart. It looks like OAA is quite a bit more aggressive about assigning credit than UZR, but not necessarily more aggressive at assigning blame.
UZR has a built-in regression component precisely for this reason, that it is less knowledgeable.
OAA doesn’t have this issue. There’s no reason for OAA to be “dampened” in any way.
As for arms: that’ll be forthcoming this season.
Would it be possible to add Sweet Spot % to the statcast metrics with the other statcast quality of contact info?