The object of baseball is to score more runs than the bad guys. Seems simple enough. But when it comes to evaluating individual players, we have a really, really hard time figuring out exactly how valuable that guy is to his team's ability to score runs.
The challenge of baseball statistics is to determine a hitter's contribution to the runs his team scores, irrespective of the performance of his teammates. Clearly, RBIs and runs scored are heavily dependent on your teammates' ability to get on base or drive you in. Therefore, a useful hitting statistic should somehow ignore what the guys in front of or behind you have done.
The other challenge is to distill totals like hits, walks, and home runs into the value they add to a team's ability to score runs. How valuable is a walk versus a base hit? How valuable is a stolen base?
I postulate that a hitter's value comes in his ability to advance both himself and his teammates around the bases, and that his value is directly proportional to the total number of bases both he and his teammates advance as a result of his plate appearances.
How to turn this idea into an actual stat...well, I'll get to that later.
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