Willie Wilson had a career .702 OPS. It bothers me that OPS doesn’t give him credit for his 648 stolen bases.
Willie Wilson is why I’ve been thinking though a new stat, OPSB – to include on-base percentage, slugging percentage and net stolen bases, total steals minus caught stealing.
The idea here being: a guy gets two total bases for a double, so why shouldn’t a guy who singles or reaches on a base on balls or hit by pitch get two total bases if he then steals second?
I’ll go back to Willie Wilson to illustrate.
Wilson’s career OPS at .702 resets to an OPSB of .771, which is Alan Trammell/Robin Yount OPS territory.
Both of those guys, of course, being in the Hall of Fame.
The case of Rickey Henderson, 347th on the all-time OPS list, at .820, changes dramatically, with his net +1,071 stolen bases pushing his OPSB to .917, which would be in the vicinity of Top 50 in our current measure of OPS all-time.
Rickey, being Rickey, is already one of the game’s all-time greats.
My new OPSB stat just adds another line demonstrating Rickey’s impact on the game.
The most dramatic impact on how we view a guy differently could be the case of Kenny Lofton, who was only on the Hall of Fame ballot for one year, despite a 68.4 career WAR and 43.4 seven-year peak WAR.
Lofton is currently 551st in career OPS, at .794.
Lofton’s OPSB: .852, which would move him within the Top 200 in relation to the current OPS list.
Kenny Lofton, who was also a great defensive player, with nine Gold Gloves, should already be a Hall of Famer, but it gets harder to keep him out when you start thinking of him as a Top 200 offense guy.
Caveat to my numbers: I’m, admittedly, cherry-picking examples to illustrate how I think the new stat that I’m proposing could change the way we view certain guys.
Somebody with more time (or more knowledge of how to use AI to do dirty work) can re-jigger the all-time list so that we can get a fair apples-to-apples for a new OPSB stat category.
And I’ll concede here, that I can see the arguments against my new stat, one being, a guy can steal bases after reaching on an error or a fielder’s choice, another being, attempts that are the back end of double steals.
I’m OK with giving a guy credit for taking an extra base after reaching base on what otherwise counts as an out on his at-bat ledger, because that extra base is one that gets him into scoring position.
I’d say, same, on the back end of double steals, just because, those aren’t automatic.
I can see an argument being made for further rewarding guys who are adept at taking an extra base on base hits, ground balls and fly balls, the only possible limitation there being, to compare people from the modern era, where we have developed statistics to measure one’s ability to gain an extra base on the basepaths, to past eras, would be almost impossible, though we could do this for players in the modern era and going forward from here.
I’ll let people smarter than me work on that one.
I’m advocating here for something that we can use to compare guys across eras.
Like, for example, Vince Coleman, sixth on the all-time stolen base list, and one of only two players among the Top 11 on that list not in the Hall of Fame (the other: Arlie Latham, a 19th-century third baseman).
OPSB doesn’t make Coleman (career WAR: a paltry 12.5) a Hall of Famer, but it does put his .668 career OPS into a different perspective, when you get a career OPSB of .774, which moves him from sub-1000 on the OPS list into the area of what would be Top 750 on the current OPS list.
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Chris Graham
