To pick up on Walt (and other's) complaints about the offensive efficiency - or lack thereof - of the 2015 baseball squad, I thought I would run some numbers and get some hard data.
I'm using a measure of offensive efficiency described here:
http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2014/2/...efficiency
The basic concept is how good are you at turning baserunners into runs, which is what I gather the complaint is about (Walt, feel free to chime in if I'm off base). Rice is excellent at generating baserunners (#3 nationally in hits, for example), and really not bad at scoring runs (we rank #25 in that category). These rankings can be misleading however, as they don't adjust for number of games played.
Total baserunners is estimated by taking PA * OBP. That's compared to the number of runs scored for an offensive efficiency rating.
For Rice, we have 190 runs generated from 469 baserunners (1260 PA * our 0.373 OBP). This turns out to rank #89 nationally. Ranking all 295 D1 teams (I ignored the 6 reclassifying ones) shows a fairly normal distribution.
Rice is on the right half, roughly 1/2 of a standard deviation above the mean.
Anticipating Walt's objection that he only cares to compare Rice to the
elite teams, not all of D1, I pulled out just the 30 teams currently ranked by the writers.
Rice is smack in the middle, and we've lost our bell curve. This implies to me that this measure of offensive efficiency is at best weakly correlated to on-field success. Note that six of the Top 30 teams actually fall below the overall D1 mean in this measure. The original author, in the link above, found a correlation of 0.586 to winning percentage for this stat in MLB, which is all well and good, but it doesn't seem to hold as well for the college game.
For those interested, the top 10 in offensive efficiency:
Code:
Rank Team G W-L AB H BB HBP SF SH OBP PA BR R Off Eff
1 Richmond 22 14-8 786 240 108 25 6 15 0.403 940 378 192 0.508
2 North Florida 31 20-11 1,111 337 104 23 19 16 0.369 1273 469 238 0.507
3 Coastal Caro. 28 21-7 945 260 134 35 15 32 0.38 1161 441 217 0.492
4 Belmont 25 14-11 856 258 138 33 16 13 0.411 1056 434 213 0.491
5 Jackson St. 26 16-10 893 273 133 45 13 19 0.416 1103 458 222 0.485
6 UNCW 26 18-8 908 278 92 14 13 21 0.374 1048 391 187 0.478
7 UCF 30 22-8 1,049 342 137 43 12 15 0.421 1256 528 251 0.475
8 Arizona 28 22-6 966 321 115 18 20 35 0.406 1154 468 220 0.470
9 Col. of Charleston 25 18-7 881 270 90 18 14 9 0.377 1012 381 179 0.470
10 Southeast Mo. St. 28 17-11 964 286 173 24 13 17 0.411 1191 489 229 0.468
Others of note:
14 A&M
34 TSU
58 TCU
79 UH
97 Lamar
175 UT
219 Stanford