One of the additions to the PI (rolled out this morning by Sean) is a neat arithmetic function that allows comparison of two stats as one of the search criteria for batting or pitching seasons. I've been hoping for something like this for a while.

Here are some of the neat things you can do with it.

First, go to the Batting Season Finder.

In the criteria selection area (the white area in the lower right), you'll see that the fifth line down contains an equation. I've highlighted it for you:

This entry allows the user to compare one stat to another stat, and optionally to add in a multiplying factor.

Here's an example. Let's take a look at guys who have driven in a lot of runs per plate appearance. In the box I've highlighted red above, I'm choosing RBI on the left and PA on the right. I'm also changing the multiplying factor from the default of 1.0 to a value of 0.2. Finally, I'm changing the sign from the default of "=" to a ">" sign. This, then, looks for seasons in which the players RBI total is greater than 20% of his plate appearance total.

I changed the years to search just in 2009 and here are the results:

I've sorted the results by plate appearance. So, again, this shows guys who batted in a run at least, on average, once every 5 plate appearances. It's not such an easy thing to do. One note is that the search uses a greater-than sign, and not a greater-than-or-equals sign. This means that guys with an RBI total that is exactly 20% of their PA total don't show up. There's an easy fix to this, and that's changing the multiplying factor from 0.2 to 0.1999. Here is the new list in that case:

This adds a bunch of players with exactly 5 times the PA as RBI, headed by new #8 Ryan Rohlinger.

I think we can all agree that many of these players are irrelevant for this particular search, so let's make two more changes. Let's limit the plate appearances to 100 or more and let's expand the search to the last 10 seasons:

Pretty neat, huh? While there are a lot of expected seasons in there (mainly big-HR total seasons such as Ortiz in 2005 and Sosa in 2001) we find a lot of hidden gems. How about Alex Ochoa in 2000 (#49)?He batted in 58 runs with just 275 plate appearances. A lot of us probably remember Tony Clark in 2005, who batted in 87 runs in just 393 plate appearances. Even more memorable is Clark's 2007, where he got 51 RBI in just 245 PAs. Once upon a time, Mike Jacobs looked pretty promising too, when he batted in 25 runs in just 112 plate appearances.

We can't yet sort the list by the arithmetic criteria, but this new feature does let us discover lots of new interesting things. I will be featuring lots of searches using the arithmetic function over the next week or so.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 at 9:23 am and is filed under Season Finders. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.