Total player rating (TPR), also known as Batter-Fielder/Pitcher Wins (BFW/PW) is a metric for measuring the value of

baseball Baseball is a bat-and-ball games, bat-and-ball sport played between two team sport, teams of nine players each, taking turns batting (baseball), batting and Fielding (baseball), fielding. The game occurs over the course of several Pitch ...

players, and to enable players to be compared against each other even when they played for different teams, at different positions, and in different eras. It was developed by

sabermetrician Sabermetrics (originally SABRmetrics) is the original or blanket term for sports analytics in the US, the empirical analysis of baseball, especially the development of advanced metrics based on baseball statistics that measure in-game activity. ...

Pete Palmer Pete Palmer (born January 30, 1938) is an American sports statistician and encyclopedia editor. He is a major contributor to the applied mathematical field referred to as sabermetrics. Along with the Bill James '' Baseball Abstracts'', Palmer's ...

and was popularized in the ''

Total Baseball ''Total Baseball'' is a 2,301-page baseball encyclopedia first compiled by John Thorn and Pete Palmer in 1989. By its fourth edition, Major League Baseball endorsed it as its official encyclopedia. The encyclopedia contains seasonal and career sta ...

'' series of encyclopedias during the 1980s. Total player rating is computed using linear weights, in which each event in a baseball game (for instance, a

base on balls A base on balls (BB), better known as a walk, occurs in baseball when a batter receives four pitches during a plate appearance that the umpire calls '' balls'', and is in turn awarded first base without the possibility of being called out. The bas ...

, a

double Double, The Double or Dubble may refer to: Mathematics and computing * Multiplication by 2 * Double precision, a floating-point representation of numbers that is typically 64 bits in length * A double number of the form x+yj, where j^2=+1 * A ...

or a

stolen base In baseball, a stolen base occurs when a runner advances to a base unaided by other actions and the official scorer rules that the advance should be credited to the action of the runner. The umpires determine whether the runner is safe or out ...

) is assigned a value in runs. Each player then has a rating in Batting Runs, Pitching Runs, and Fielding Runs, usually adjusted for park and position, and the sum of these values is divided by 10 and is expressed as an offset in games from an "average" baseball player. Thus, a star player in a season might have been worth 6 games more than an average player, while a scrub might be 5 games below average. The justification for representing a game as 10 runs was determined empirically and varied by era, but 10 was the rule of thumb for back-of-the-envelope computations, e.g. for fans comparing players using

runs created Runs created (RC) is a baseball statistics, baseball statistic invented by Bill James to estimate the number of runs a hitter contributes to their team. Purpose James explains in his book, ''The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract'', why he be ...

. TPR helped disseminate the notion that players should not be given credit for events over which they have no control. As an example which embraces giving such credit, the

runs batted in A run batted in or runs batted in (RBI) is a statistic in baseball and softball that credits a batter for making a play that allows a run to be scored (except in certain situations such as when an error is made on the play). For example, if th ...

(RBI)

statistic A statistic (singular) or sample statistic is any quantity computed from values in a sample which is considered for a statistical purpose. Statistical purposes include estimating a population parameter, describing a sample, or evaluating a hypot ...

awards a hitter with runs which scored when he collected a hit or a walk, even though the player has no control over whether the players who batted before him got on base, which is a significant influence on whether he is able to drive them in. Thus, players with high RBI totals for a season may have such not because they're among the best hitters themselves, but because they hit behind players who are among the best at getting on base. In the 1990s, some criticisms of TPR prompted other sabermetricians to develop new methods of measuring player value, such as

equivalent average Equivalent Average (EqA) is a baseball metric invented by Clay Davenport and intended to express the production of hitters in a context independent of park and league effects. It represents a hitter's productivity using the same scale as batting a ...

and

value over replacement player In baseball, value over replacement player (or VORP) is a statistic popularized by Keith Woolner that demonstrates how much a hitter, pitcher or outfielder contributes to their team in comparison to a replacement-level player who is an average fie ...

Bill James George William James (born October 5, 1949) is an American baseball writer, historian, and statistician whose work has been widely influential. Since 1977, James has written more than two dozen books about baseball history and statistics. His a ...

presented some of these criticisms in his book '' Win Shares'', foremost among them being the observation that an average player has a TPR value of 0, whereas in fact an average player has substantial positive value.

References

{{Reflist Baseball statistics