Chemical Reaction

Dave Paisley

With the last handful of games remaining, it appears that Barry Bonds will pass Mark McGwire's home run record, probably not make the playoffs and may be deprived of a fourth NL MVP award, primarily due to the more likeable nature of Sammy Sosa. Using Bonfds and the Giants as an example, and by peering into the intricacies of individual and team scoring, I believe I may have come up with a way to measure team chemistry without actuially resorting to dissecting any ballplayers...

I've seen a lot of newspaper, online media and fan chat about Bonds, and there's no doubt the baseball world falls squarely in on eof two camps.

Camp One would say Bonds is amazing, superlative, having the best season since Babe Ruth played and deserves to be the unanimous MVP. You can't pay attention to things like RBIs because they are dependent on the team situation a player finds himself in. Besides, with Rich Aurilia hitting so many homers, Bonds has been robbed. Robbed I tell ya!) of many RBI opportunities. Why, Sammy Sosa has three times as many plate appearances with men in scoring position as Barry does.

Camp Two, on the other hand, points to Bonds as a player out for only what he can get for himself. Despite the gaudy personal numbers, he hasn't scored as many runs or driven in as many as Sosa, so really he doesn't deserve to be MVP anyway. Besides, he's not very likeable - even his own teammates ignored him when he hit career homer #500, right?

As usual, the truth lies somewhere between. In this column, I'll occasionally bang the drum for the marriage of old-time stats (RBI, R) with the new fangled ones (like OPS) and I'm going to do it one more time because, well, I can. And because it helps illuminate the Bonds situation a little. First, in the traditional world, I like to look at Runs Scored and RBI together. One of each results in the team scoring a run, and a home run takes care of both ends of the deal. Add R to RBI, divide by 2 (I call it Runs Generated) and you have a pretty good idea of what a player has contributed to the team. Divide it by the number of outs he made and you have a real handy measure of usefulness. Outs are easy to calculate by subtracting hits from at bats, by the way (not counting the extra outs from double plays, etc.)

Anyway, it's interesting to see how RG/Out correlates with OPS (On base percentage plus slugging average.) Here's a chart of all the NL players with more than 400 AB so far this year:

As you can see, the correlation is excellent. Note the one blue diamond way up to the top right of the diagram. That's Barry Bonds. The cluster of players around an OPS of 1.1 - that's Sosa, Larry Walker, Luis Gonzalez and Todd Helton - is also impressive, but Bonds is quite obviously in a class by himself. The other interesting thing is that while he has the highest RG/Out in the league, he is far below the average line through all the data. In fact, of all the players on the chart, he is the furthest away from the line. Based on his OPS, he should be scoring and driving in about 10% more runs than he is.

The Camp One argument would be that Barry's RBIs are being hawked by Rich Aurilia, right? Well, no. There are five Giants regulars who qualify with the 400 AB criterion (Bonds, Aurilia, Kent, VanderWal and Santiago) and they are all under the trend line for RG/Out, by between 7 and 17%. So what are we to make of this? I thought I'd take a look at team runs scored to see if I could figure it out. Here's team runs per game against team OPS:

The tightness of the correlation is amazing except for two teams. There's a team with a .800 OPS that has scored only 4.9 runs per game (well below the line), and one that has scored the same but with a measly .733 OPS. Any guesses as to which the first team is? Yep, the Giants. So not only is Barry Bonds not getting his fair allotment of runs and RBI, nobody on his team is getting them either. Why are the Giants getting so little out of so much raw OPS? I don’t see them enough to be able to tell, but it is possible that an offense that revolves around primarily one person (three at most if you add in Aurilia and Kent) is easier to work around and avoid heavy damage.

The other team (they of the .733 OPS), by the way, is mighty San Diego. And also by the way, they have six players with 400 AB or more (Nevin, Klesko, Kotsay, Trammell, Davis and Jackson) and every single one of them is above the trend line, varying from 5% to 12%. Is this a case of the total being better than the sum of the parts? Is this chemistry in action? Just for comparison, the Seattle Mariners, this year's poster team for chemical reactions, has seven players who qualify, and five of them are way over the line - the top three being Bret Boone (15%), Carlos Guillen (17%, despite the tuberculosis) and Mike Cameron (18%.) Even the two players below the line, Olerud and Ichiro, are only a hair below.

The lesson in this (and Seattle has been demonstrating this all year) is that it may be better to have a well-balanced attack with no single focal point that can be easily nullified. Sure, the one star may end up with gaudy numbers, but his team will be less effective at scoring runs overall, and hence less likely to make the post-season. Let's face it, 20 more runs would mean a couple more wins for the Giants and they could absolutely be the difference between them making the playoffs or not. Right now it looks like not.

Maybe Barry will get his MVP, maybe he won't. But if he doesn't make the playoffs, does it really matter all that much anyway? At least he'll have the consolation that Sammy isn't going either.

about the author

The last time Dave Paisley dabbled with chemistry, his backpack got eaten away by acid and an oil bath caught on fire. Why not reassure him how much safer baseball is by dropping him a line at drdjp@strikethree.com.