JTJ's Baseball Journal: Our Outfielder Five-Tool Number

By JT

We've always liked the Power-Speed number found on Baseball-Reference.com. It's the harmonic mean of home runs and stolen bases and was developed by the great Bill James.

Here is the current leaderboard—

Anytime you get a metric that confirms what the "eye-test" tells you it is useful and interesting.

Well, taking a page from Mr. James we've developed an outfielder metric we call the "5-Tool Number".

It is flawed, JUST LIKE ALL SPORTS STATISTICS but is a good jumping-off point.

Here is the definition—

Here is our definition of "Fielding runs"—

Essentially it takes Michael Humphreys' DRA runs saved, rField run saved and Bill James' fielding Win Shares (times 3) and then divided by four.

This is problematic because there is disagreement on runs saved and also, as of this past weekend (2/1/21) DRA numbers are no longer widely available since BaseballGauge.com went dark. We understand they may come back in the future, so there is hope.

So, we may change this to Win Shares only (they can never be negative and therefore each player will have a score for each year) or eliminate outliers or something like that. But this is how we've done it for now.

So, for some of the more modern players, there is not an exact apples-to-apples comparison until we can get the DRA runs saved for him and Trout, Mookie Betts, and Vlad Guerrero, etc. But it doesn't matter much at this point anyway, as we said this is a starting point and smarter minds than mine will refine and fix it. So, for now we look at the names you'd expect—Mays, Aaron, Andruw Jones, Barry Bonds, Ken Griffey Jr., Clemente, and others.

We realize that Mays could have stolen a lot more bases than he did. We also know that once an outfield gets a good "rep" for his arm his OF assists drop. But this is not a scouting evaluation, it's a metric like Power-Speed Number.

Anyway, we hope there can be a way to get a fielding runs saved number that can be universally accepted and that can include run saved through holding runners. But that day is not yet here, as I understand it.

Also, this is really for post-integration players and remember this is a work-in-progress we are working on doing more players and coming up with a number. So, this is not nearly a complete list.

One final note if a category is blank, there is no numbers. One cannot have a harmonic mean if one of the categories is zero or below. This is key—

For this, one needs to do well in all five to score high. And it seems anything over 20 for a season is rare or "great".