Word: rpg
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...Drew fly ball to centerfield leaves the runners stranded and the Cardinals scoreless in the first, Morris returns to his chart. Taking out a mechanical blue pencil and scientific calculator, Morris lays out the formula for the new all-in-one offensive statistic he has developed, Runs Per Game (RPG...
...recently featured in a column on ESPN.com. A slightly frail-looking white-haired 62-year-old whose athletic career peaked on his high school tennis team, Morris would seem an unlikely subject for a feature on the sports website. But Morris’s efforts to promote RPG, a statistical formula that predicts how many runs a lineup of nine of the same player would score in a game, earned him a column focusing on the statistic and its new record-holder, Barry Bonds (who happens to be fourth up in the bottom of the first). The formula...
...either counting (total home runs or wins) or percentage (batting average or slugging percentage), Morris’s formula was derived from a technique in academic statistics known as Markovian modeling, which he says makes it qualitatively different from any statistic a casual fan would be familiar with. RPG, Morris says, takes much of the interpretation out of statistics (different fans may value on-base percentage or RBI differently, and sabermetricians frequently assign debatable weights to statistics such as stolen bases) and says with statistical certainty how many runs per game nine of a given player would produce on average...
...idea behind RPG is not new. In 1977, Morris’ friend Thomas Cover, now Li Professor of Electrical Engineering and Statistics at Stanford, published an article in the Journal of Operations Research that introduced the precursor to RPG, Offensive Earned Run Average (OERA). “We wanted a simple statistic that would summarize the offensive power of a player,” Cover says. “We imagined putting the batter in all nine positions and seeing how many runs he would generate.” Using an elaborate process called matrix inversion and the 24-square...
However, a garden-variety Statistics 100 course doesn’t come close to teaching you how to figure out an OERA. Morris’ contribution was to derive a simple formula, RPG, that calculated OERA without advanced techniques. “This [OERA] paper lay dormant [until] Morris found a simple formula for it,” Cover says. “He has made it a worthwhile statistic. I’m involved in the past history of it, but Morris is the one who’s made this work...