Blake Snell Needs a Refresher on Advanced Statistics
Padres pitcher Blake Snell might have a future in broadcasting after he’s done with his playing career. Just listen to his electric call of Juan Soto’s RBI triple while he was being interviewed during Tuesday night’s game against the Reds. He probably won’t have a career in the front office whenever he hangs it up, though.
Later in that inning, Snell had a question about sabermetrics for the announcers.
“On the [score]board, it said wRC+. What does that mean?” he asked.
“I have no idea,” play-by-play man Don Orsillo replied. Color commentator Mark Grant couldn’t give him an answer either.
Eventually Snell was informed that it stands for weighted runs created plus, but neither broadcaster could offer him even a basic explanation for what it means.
Announcers don’t have to know everything but it’s honestly pretty embarrassing that neither Orsillo nor Grant could even explain what the plus sign at the end means. That might be the simplest thing about any sabermetric stat. It just means that the statistic is adjusted against league averages and the player’s ballpark, with 100 being average. So when the scoreboard showed that Manny Machado ranked second in the majors with a 152 wRC+ last season, that means he was 52% better than the average player. Pretty easy, huh?
In the most basic terms, wRC+ is a supercharged version of OPS that takes into account the fact that all times reaching base are not created equal and then averages everything together into one easily digestible number. It’s really helpful—if someone’s able to explain it to you.
