FanPost

Evaluating Mets Baserunning

Baseball Prospectus has some great baserunning stats linked here, which indicate how many runs above or below average a player's baserunning ability is worth. Stolen bases/caught stealings (SB/CS) and advancement on groundouts, flyouts, hits, passed balls, wild pitches, and balks are considered. Based on an idea from Beyond the Boxscore, I compiled the 2008 Mets players baserunning run values. The statistic wRAA includes SB/CS, and is used as the offense component of WAR. Therefore I removed the effect of SB/CS to focus only on the value of other baserunning factors. Here are the numbers:

Player Runs
Jose Reyes 6.5
Carlos Beltran 4.37
Angel Pagan 2.05
Endy Chavez 1.61
Luis Castillo 1.59
Ryan Church 1.41
Damion Easley 1.24
Argenis Reyes 0.95
Marlon Anderson 0.67
Daniel Murphy 0.63
Carlos Delgado 0.05
Fernando Tatis -0.17
Nick Evans -0.45
Ramon Castro -0.85
Brian Schneider -1.59
David Wright -2.71

A few notes:

  • Jose Reyes is even more valuable than we thought, worth .65 wins with his legs. He was worth about the same in 2007 as well.
  • Carlos Voltron.
  • It's surprising to see David Wright perform so poorly here. Maybe it's because of his frantic running form, but my perception is that he is fast and a good baserunner. He was better in 2007 though.
  • Endy would have been worth more if Luis Aguayo knew how to throw up the stop sign once in awhile.

Here are the "new" WAR figures for the 2008 Mets, calculated by adding baserunning runs to Fangraphs "old" WAR:

Player Old WAR New WAR
David Wright 7.42 7.15
Carlos Beltran 6.54 6.98
Jose Reyes 5.83 6.48
Carlos Delgado 2.95 2.96
Ryan Church 1.48 1.62
Fernando Tatis 1.57 1.55
Brian Schneider 1.64 1.48
Daniel Murphy 1.00 1.06
Endy Chavez 0.90 1.06
Ramon Castro 0.92 0.83
Luis Castillo 0.55 0.71
Angel Pagan 0.33 0.53
Damion Easley 0.38 0.5
Nick Evans 0.10 0.06
Argenis Reyes -0.18 -0.09
Marlon Anderson -0.78 -0.71

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