The truth is that there are a thousand formulas for measuring baseball player’s production and performance and there are probably multiple ways of explaining or defining the difference between “production” and “performance”. Nevertheless, having invented Efficiency Rating for basketball, which is an all-encompassing comprehensive stat to measure the overall value of a player, I decided I could do the same in baseball.

Plate Production (PP) and Plate Performance (PPF) are stats that describe how good is an individual hitter. There are other such formulas. For example, OPS is a common formula for evaluating how effective is a hitter. But, you have to realize that OPS is not even as good as a far less known, far less popular alternative (GPA).

And, trust me, there are others. For the sake of this site and this category, I’m only going to discuss Plate Performance against OPS since it is somewhat of a gold standard for overall hitting.

I will get back to Plate Performance (PPF) and OPS shortly, but first let’s look at Plate Production (PP).

The difference between PP and PPF is that PP is cumulative while PPF is a ratio. In sports there are cumulative stats – like Home Runs or Stolen Bases and there are ratio stats like Earned Run Average (Earned Runs / Innings Pitched x 9) or Batting Average (Hits / At-Bats).

PP is a cumulative stat. As I say, baseball has a lot of these for a single season or a career. Home Runs, Hits, Doubles, Stolen Bases, Strike Outs, Wins, Errors, Walks and many more.

To the best of my knowledge of all the all-encompassing stats to describe a hitter’s overall value, they are all ratio stats like OPS and none of them are cumulative. That’s what makes Plate Performance special.

Suppose I give you these two players’ stats and ask you to tell me which is superior. Blue numbers are superior between the two players.



I can tell you right now… you don’t have the faintest idea which is superior because 1) you don’t know their names – which means you can’t rely on your bias and 2) there simply is too much data to absorb and wrap your mind around to say definitively which is better.

Besides, irrespective of which of the two you answered, you would have been wrong. I made it such that both players ended up with a PP of +70. Now, isn't that a thousand times easier to comprehend than trying to digest all of that data into one rating in your head for each player and then to come to a conclusion about which is superior?

The league average PP for all hitters is around +4. For pitchers, it’s about -9. However, for all players combined, the average is roughly zero – which is just pure coincidence – but a beautiful fact or an elegant statistic regardless.

PP = Plate Production. Total Bases + Hit by pitch + Walks + Steals + RBI + Runs – Outs - Caught Stealing - Double Plays Hit Into.

The point is that to the degree a player is greater than zero, he’s productive. To the degree he’s less than zero, he’s unproductive.

As you can imagine, the more a good player plays, the higher his production will be. The more a bad player plays, the lower his production will be.

For 2012 in major league baseball, the top-3 by Plate Production were Mike Trout (+260), Ryan Braun (+254) and Miguel Cabrera (+252). The MVP race in the AL was between Trout and Cabrera. The MVP race in the NL was a battle between Braun and Buster Posey (winner). But, keep in mind that Posey is a catcher and catchers are given more weight by voters because of how hard their job is. In addition, Posey’s Giants won 94 games to Braun’s Brewers with 83. And, Posey was coming off an injury season – which gave him sympathy votes while Braun was the NL MVP the year before – which probably took some votes away. And, finally, Braun was suspected of using performance-enhancing drugs (which later was verified). Even so, the voting was close.

The point is that PP does a great job of identifying the players (by hitting and base running) that are the most productive and the reason is because the formula is good, but also because it is “cumulative” – and production (as well as Most Valuable) is mostly a function of cumulative stats versus ratio stats.

The comparable ratio stat to PP is Plate Performance (PPF). Going back to 2012 again, the top-3 by PPF were J.C. Boscan (.360), David Ortiz (.360) and Joey Votto (.356). You should be asking what happened to Trout, Braun and Cabrera?

Well, the problem is that when using ratio stats and no minimum number of at-bats, you get weird things. Boscan only had 10 at-bats! Ortis only had 324 AB and Votto 374 AB. Had all three of them played more, they might have challenged for the MVP.

Baseball is largely about ratio stats, but if you don’t play enough games, it’s about cumulative stats only. So, let’s say we want a minimum of 450 ABs, then the top-3 are Cabrera (.355), Braun (.350) and Trout (.340). All the sudden, there are the three players we were looking for PP – just in reverse order.

PPF = Plate Performance. (Total Bases + .4 singles + Walks + Hit by pitch) / Plate Appearances / 2.

There really isn’t anything to compare my cumulative stat (Plate Production) to that I’m aware of. However, Plate Performance is different. I can compare it to OPS for example, and so I shall.

OPS is the sum of On-Base Percentage and Slugging Percentage – two common ratio stats. OPS means On-base Plus Slugging. It’s flawed to some degree because it gives equal weight to OBP and SLG when in reality, OBP should have more weight (about 80% more) than SLG. But, as a back of the envelope stat that is simple to calculate (if you have OBP and SLG), OPS is not bad.

In order to compare OPS to PPF, I need to divide OPS by three and PPF by two. That makes both stats about equivalent to something we can appreciate aesthetically. What I mean is that we are used to thinking that .400 is historical, .300 is good, .200 sucks. Those preconceptions are based upon batting average, but we’ve heard those numbers a bazillion times and so we know what they mean. By dividing OPS by three and PPF by two, it puts them in the same range that we are comfortable with.

So, let’s apply a minimum number of at-bats to 2012. Let’s say 450. Here are the top-10 in the major leagues by both PPF/2 and OPS/3.

You can see the top-10 are the same. There is very little deviation between them. So, naturally you should ask… why have PPF when OPS is readily available?

The only answer I can give for that, other than the fact that I invented it, is that PPF more closely corresponds to PP and PP is great. This correlation is more apparent beyond the top-10, but let’s look at the same top-10 players and include PP’s ranking.

In the five cases where PPF and OPS disagree (bolded), PP agrees more with PPF three times and OPS twice.

Do I have a problem with anyone using OPS. Of course not. I use it, but most of the reason I use it is because it’s so readily available and sortable either on MLB.com or BaseballReference. But, I also know that OPS is not technically correct because it undervalues OBP. Even so, as we can see, it still tends to do a good job.

Whether PPF ever catches on or not is not a big deal. Clearly OPS works fine. But, PP should catch on because there simply isn’t a cumulative comprehensive all-encompassing stat for major league baseball players that I’m aware of… and there should be.