Frank Thomas is having an excellent season: 35 HRs, a .395 OBP, and a .560 SLG. Because of his injury problems, he’s been limited to a mere 8 doubles. Now, maybe he’s changed his approach at the plate because he knows he can’t leg out many extra-base hits and he really wouldn’t have many more than 8 doubles if he was healthy. But as Thomas has never really been a speed-demon at any point in his career, I’m going to guess his injury’s cost him about 20 doubles this year — let’s call them phantom doubles.
Changing 20 singles into doubles kicks up his slugging percentage into the .600 range. Thomas is already 20th in the AL in VORP at 38 runs above replacement. The linear weights difference between a single and double is about .2 runs. Adding 20 doubles gives him 4 more runs, bumping Thomas into a dead heat with Jason Giambi at 16th. (Not that he actually deserves that extra credit, as being slow is a real disadvantage. Nor should we be at all disappointed with The Big Hurt’s numbers as they actually are.)
On second thought, let me throw something out there in favor of giving Thomas at least partial credit for those phantom doubles. As Tango’s pointed out, every batting event can be separated into two valuable parts: getting on base, and advancing runners. While Thomas’ phantom doubles don’t do anything to advance him past first, they’re better than regular old singles at advancing other runners. If there were any runners on base, they’d likely advance as if Frank had actually cracked a two-bagger.
So what percentage of the double’s value above a single lies in advancing other runners? Well, every double yields one extra base to the batter. It’s really only runners on first that can advance more on a double than single, although a double’s occassionally helpful to a runner on second. I can’t see the part-time extra advancement of runners already on base outweighing the every-time advancement of the batter, meaning we should only give Thomas credit for 1.5 to 2 of the extra runs. (In fact, if I’m interpreting Tango’s chart in the link above correctly, the added bonus to the batter getting on base is slightly larger than the added bonus of advancing runners, backing up my WAG.)
No, a two run difference is not a big deal. But this whole thought-experiment leads me to believe that the power demonstrated by slow sluggers is probably slightly undervalued. And the slugging percentages of speedy hitters who leg out extra doubles or triples probably overrate their value to a small degree. Of course, most ratings systems don’t include baserunning ability, where the speedy hitter likely gain back this disadvantage from the slow sluggers (and more). I guess we’ve been okay all along.
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Sky is a baseball fan and racket sport afficianado living in upstate NY. His favorite color is orange and is just about ready to give up on his life-long dream to become the next Magnus ver Magnuson (World's Strongest Man). His favorite baseball teams are the Yankees and Red Sox, proving that there's hope in the Middle East.
September 13th, 2006 at 5:09 pm
That link shows a +.16 run advantage for the batter being on 2b as opposed to 1B.
As well, it shows a +.13 run advantage to the runners on base on moving from a 2b as opposed to a 1b.
If 20 of those singles were really loooong-singles, quasi-doubles, the runners on base would have move 20x.13=2.6 runs more than a traditional single would give Frank credit for.
It would be interesting to see this chart:
http://www.tangotiger.net/destmob.html
broken up based on the speed of the batter, so that we can see the impact of legged-out doubles, and long-singles have. Or if it’s simply just something that we believe, because it’s obvious?