The Wild Card: A look at single season leaders of non-traditional metrics for the Diamondbacks

All stats come from baseball-reference, specifically here.

To any sort of baseball aficionado, baseball-reference.com is a really nice site to be able to look up stats and other things from any point in history in baseball. Need to know Mike Piazza's slash line from those five games he played with the Marlins in 1998? You can look that up. Need to know the career stats of the awesomely-named "Mysterious Walker"? Go for it.

You can look up single season and career records for any given franchise in any particular category, and I mean any particular category. There's your standard Home Run, RBI, etc. (For the Diamondbacks is a whooooole lot of Luis Gonzalez), but you can also look at the single season Top 10 leaderboard for something like Sacrifice Bunts (For the Diamondbacks, there are three position players on that list who should feel bad about that.) B-R also has some more unknown stats, mostly ratio-based ones, that even the most ardent statistic/sabermetrics proponent probably wouldn't use in normal discourse. This week, I'm going to look at a few of these categories and see who the single season Diamondbacks leader for it is, and discuss.

Power-Speed #: Mark Reynolds 31.1 in 2009

Developed by Bill James, Power-Speed # is a calculation that takes the harmonic mean (a type of averaging, useful for rates of things) of a player's Home Run and Stolen Base totals and combines them into one number. The equation is  PSN = 2 x HR x SB / HR + SB. Generally, guys with high totals in this have been players like Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, Mike Trout, etc.

In the case of Mark Reynolds, his 2009 season was one where he hit 44 Home Runs and stole 24 bases. The latter is one of the more interesting statistical outliers in a player's career I've seen, as he has yet to break 10 again in his career since, but he's the Diamondbacks single season leader in Power-Speed # so he's got that going for him. (That was also the season he set the Major League strikeout record, so 2009 was an exciting time for Reynolds)

At Bats Per Strikeout: Alex Cintron 13.6 in 2003

Granted, this isn't too out there a concept, it's a ratio between the number of at-bats and the number of strikeouts, but it's weird  to see Alex Cintron lead the Diamondbacks in something. 

Base-Out Runs Added (RE24): Luis Gonzalez 73.56 in 2001

From Fangraphs, RE24 is explained as follows:

"RE24 (runs above average by the 24 base/out states): RE24 is the difference in run expectancy (RE) between the start of the play and the end of the play. That difference is then credited/debited to the batter and the pitcher. Over the course of the season, each players' RE24 for individual plays is added up to get his season total RE24."

So, we can sum it up simply as "It's an offensive stat, so Luis Gonzalez's 2001 season is probably the benchmark."

Base-Out Wins Added (REW): Paul Goldschmidt 6.7 in 2013

As explained by B-R:

"This is the number of wins above average the player was worth by their performance measured by the 24 base-out situations across every play in the game."

So, basically Paul Goldschmidt's 2013 season, using this metric, added almost 7 wins to the Diamondbacks' total that year, ensuring a second straight season of .500! 

Adjusted Pitching Runs:  Randy Johnson 61 in 1999

Calculated using the following equation: (Innings Pitched / 9) x (League ERA - ERA) it basically takes a pitcher and compares their performance in how many runs they've prevented to the league average in a neutral park across the same number of innings, a sort of more complex equation version of ERA+. Randy Johnson owns 5 of the Top 10 seasons in this category for the Diamondbacks.

Base-Out Runs Saved (RE24): Randy Johnson 65.56 in 1999

Just the pitching version of the stat above, it confirms what you already knew: "Randy Johnson was really really really good"

Now, you yourself may use some of these metrics in your everyday baseball analysis, which is fine. I do not, and I have not seen these used very often so I thought it would be interesting to take a look. Most of them confirm what you already knew/could calculate using other metrics (I.E: Luis Gonzalez was really good in 2001!), but it also helps shine a light on some things you may have forgotten (I.E: Mark Reynolds had a really bonkers 2009!)

What's even more fun is that there are literally hundreds of other metrics out there that I didn't even touch here. Some people, I'll call them "Over-Exaggerated Straw men I'm making up for my own purposes" may hate the advanced stats and wish they could go back to the days when mentioning an RBI total would put you on trial for witchcraft, but I love 'em. By its nature, Baseball lends itself to having different ways to calculate performance, and it's interesting to see what people come up with to try to explain the game we all love.

Who knows, maybe someday, someone will come up with a pitching category that will show that Russ Ortiz was act-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHA. Oh man, sorry, my brain went haywire for a second there. No amount of math or actual witchcraft could make that happen.