All right, I've taken some time to think about thi...

2007-01-23T10:35:00.000-05:00

All right, I've taken some time to think about this post, and here are my thoughts. The idea for DYJS came about while we were playing MVP 2003, and I would pitch and Sam would hit. We would judge our performance in individual games based on whether I limited the opposing team to less than three runs, or whether he scored three or more runs- if so, we "got the job done."

And much like Bacardi and Cola, one thing that the SABRmetric statistics may not capture is consistent ability to get the job done. Yes, RBIs are largely attributed to context (you need people on base in front of you) and slugging percentage (smash! hit ball far!). Digging deeper, Tom Tango (http://www.tangotiger.net) has said that even Win Shares and Runs Created have problems because they do not take into account the dynamic context in which runs are actually created, leading to wins. His Leverage Index attemps to combat this by analyzing all on base/out/inning combinations to determine which are most critical in a baseball game. This contextualizes the baseball game on the level of independent events.

DYJS, meanwhile, looks as though it will contextualize baseball performance on the game-by-game level. That is, out of 162 games, how often did a given player do something that put his team in a position to win.

It will be interesting to see if we can set up a program that charts player's DYJS throughout a season, and whether these numbers correspond to Win Shares or VORP or even to the "clutchitude" parameter on fangraphs.com. If Sam can set up the program, we can even try to run it on the 2006 boxscores to see what we come up with, and maybe tweak the formula a bit. Stay tuned.

Comments on The Immaculate Inning: The Did Your Job Stat(DYJS)

All right, I've taken some time to think about thi...