What is wRC+?

by
December 13, 2009

As you may have noticed, there’s now an extra column in the “Advanced” section for batting stats called “wRC+”. You can think of this stat as a wOBA based version of OPS+. It’s park and league adjusted and it’s on a very similar scale as OPS+. The difference is that it uses wRC, which is based on wOBA.

For those of you not familiar with the scale, 100 is average. Anything higher is above average and anything below 100 is below average.

Big thanks goes out to Tangotiger for pointing out how easy it was to implement this particular stat. It’s now available in all the player pages for major league and minor league players going all the way back to 1871. Please note that it is not park adjusted for minor league stats, but it is league adjusted.

It’s also in the career leaderboards and will soon be making its way into the individual season leaderboards too.

Update: I’ve removed pitchers from the league baselines, so the values will have changed slightly since this morning.

You Aren't a FanGraphs Member
It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed.
We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.
1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other.
2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.
3. Dark mode and Classic mode!
4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.
5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.
6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)
7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.
8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO.
9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members.
10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features!
We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it.




 

David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.

53 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
brent in Korea
15 years ago

Thanks for the new shiny toy!

3
Bradley WoodrumMember since 2020
15 years ago
Reply to  brent in Korea

Yeah, thanks!

Sabermetrics I can understand, but how this site works is beyond me! I’m assuming Fangraphs is assembled and maintained using only the finest of black magic HTML coding and ancient, runic Javascripts.

Thanks again, David and Dave and all the others who keep the hamsters running!

2