One statistic that has become popular among sabermetricians recently is Weighted Runs Created (wRC) which measures the amount of runs a player contributes to their team over the course of a season.  wRC  is a stastic similar to Weighted On-Base Average (wOBA) but wRC is a counting statistic and counts the number of runs a player contributes throughout a season which places an emphasis on a batter’s playing time while wOBA is a rate statistic (Hardball Times).

wRC is based off of Bill James’ statistic of Runs Created which also estimated the number of runs a player contributed to the team.  Since runs lead to wins, the more runs a player can contribute to his team throughout a season, the more wins they should be able to contribute to as well.  Tom Tango of Tangotiger then created wRC based off of wOBA  as seen in the formula below, courtesy of FanGraphs:

(((wOBA - lgwOBA) / wOBAScale) + (lgR/PA)) * PA

The statistics involved in wRC are runs, plate appearances, walks, hit by pitch, singles, doubles, triples, home runs stolen bases and caught stealings, or basically all of the statistics a player can control to lead to producing runs.  It’s important to remember however that a player can get on base all he wants, but if the players behind him don’t contribute and knock him in, his efforts will be for naught showing that although we place such an emphasis on baseball being an individualistic sport, there are still elements of the game that require relying on teammates to create wins.

Thursday, we’ll look at the top wRC producers this year, see whether it correlates to Wins Above Replacement (WAR) and use it to delve deeper into the Trout-Cabrera MVP debate that is heating up.