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 sport played between two teams of nine players each, taking turns batting and fielding. The game occurs over the course of several plays, with each play generally beginning when a player on the fielding tea ...
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, or originally SABRmetrics, is the empirical analysis of baseball, especially baseball statistics that measure in-game activity. Sabermetricians collect and summarize the relevant data from this in-game activity to answer specific ques ...
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'' (latest edition , first published 1989) is a baseball encyclopedia first compiled by John Thorn and Pete Palmer in 1989. The latest edition, published in 2004, is its eighth.linear weights, in which each event in a baseball game (for instance, a
base on balls
A base on balls (BB), also known as a walk, occurs in baseball when a batter receives four pitches that the umpire calls '' balls'', and is in turn awarded first base without the possibility of being called out. The base on balls is defined in Se ...
, a
double
A double is a look-alike or doppelgänger; one person or being that resembles another.
Double, The Double or Dubble may also refer to:
Film and television
* Double (filmmaking), someone who substitutes for the credited actor of a character
* Th ...
or a
stolen base
In baseball, a stolen base occurs when a runner advances to a base to which they are not entitled 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 ...
) 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 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 believes runs created is ...
.
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 (RBI; plural RBIs ) 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 the bat ...
(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 hypo ...
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 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 or pitcher contributes to their team in comparison to a replacement-level player who is an average fielder at that ...
.
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 devoted to baseball history and statistics. ...
cogently 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.{{Citation needed, date=September 2020
The fielding component of TPR is also flawed, so its evaluation of fielding is poorly regarded by most fans. TPR has been greatly improved upon in a system called super linear weights, available in the archives o Baseball Primer
Nonetheless, the importance of TPR in the history of sabermetric analysis seems secure: for many years it was the best-known of the sabermetric stats and was used by thousands of fans who had purchased ''Total Baseball''.
Baseball statistics