Recently, I was scrolling through Baseball Prospectus when I saw they had a new metric on. To be quite honest, I did not look into Baseball Prospectus as much as I did to Fangraphs even though I saw Baseball Prospectus a year ago because I was discouraged by the paywall and the fact that I knew most of the statistics from Fangraphs did not really make me think that deep in this website there was new information for me to discover. Yet, I found a new metric that Fangraphs that does not cover: DRA- and DRC+, which are similar to the ERA- and wRC+ except they account for a lot more things such as home/away games, players/teams they are going against, and other conditions. I still think that FIP and xFIP are much simpler to understand, but DRA- could be a much more valuable tool for sabermetricians like me to look at since they account for many more variables. Both FIP and DRA- work in that they factor in defense the most out of all of the metrics, but DRA- also factors in other metrics such as the players the pitcher is going against and the field that the player is in. A similar logic can be applied for DPC+, where they consider the park that player plays in along with the pitcher that the hitter faces in order to create a much more encompassing metric that measures the player's pure skill. Remember that the most important thing for sabermetricians is to answer questions so that they can create a much more accurate metric that measures a player's ability and predict the future based on these metrics. By doing so, we can truly appreciate some of the contributions and dominance that these players have asserted and appreciate them to what the game is today.
top of page
bottom of page