When we talk about offensive statistics, the ones we usually talk about on New English D are wOBA and wRC+ which take the actual value of each offensive action and weight them properly, which OBP and SLG do not do. I encourage you to clink the links and read about those statistics if you have not already done so. However, those two statistics are rate stats and not counting stats. Rate stats tell you how well a player has performed while they’ve been on the field, but counting stats are also good for telling you how much value a player has actually added to his team.

If you have a 150 wRC+, but only have half the plate appearances of someone with a 120 wRC+, you’re not as valuable. You need to be both a good performer and a player who stays healthy and on the field. With that, I’ll introduce Weighted Runs Above Average (wRAA) to do just that. Weighted Runs Created (notice the absence of the plus sign) is a similar statistic, but it is just scaled differently. The concept is the same, but let’s stick with wRAA.

wRAA is the offensive component of Wins Above Replacement (WAR) and is based on wOBA and is rather simple to calculate if you have all of the necessary numbers.

((wOBA – League Average wOBA)/wOBA scale) * (PA)

A player’s wOBA and PA are pretty obvious and the league average and wOBA scale be found for each season quite easily here. The idea behind this statistic is how many runs a player is worth to his team above average and ten runs is equivalent to one WAR. Here is the full explanation from Fangraphs but the idea is pretty simple. How many runs above average has a player been worth to his team. Average, therefore, is 0 and anything above 10 is good and above 20 is great. It is also a counting stat, so players accumulate them throughout the season as opposed to wRC+ and wOBA which are rate stats.

I generally like rate stats better, but counting stats are an important comparison. Here’s a quick example:

Miguel Cabrera has a 193 wRC+ and .456 wOBA in 325 PA while Matt Tuiasosopo has a 186 wRC+ and .446 wOBA in 88 PA. Cabrera and Tuiasosopo have very similar rate stats, but you can distinguish their value based on how many PA they have using wRAA. Cabrera has 36.9 and Tuiasosopo has 9.3.

I wouldn’t tell you to use wRAA over wRC+ or wOBA, but it is nice to use in tandem if you’re trying to compare which players have been more valuable to their team, but stick with the rate stats if you care about determining who is actually the better player.