New Baseball Stats: All-Time Offensive Leaders

Where does Pete Rose stand?

Photo credit: Tage Olsin

The extraordinary seasons of Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge, and Pete Rose’s recent passing, prompted me to finally do something I have wanted to do for a long time: create the statistics I want to see.

These are not “advanced stats” for the analytic nerds (“that guy actually sucked considering the home field he played in,” etc.). The stats I had in mind are quite simple. They may exist elsewhere because others could have easily thought of them. But instead of spending more time trying to find them, I decided to subscribe to Stathead to get the data I sought. I then set up the computations I wanted on a spreadsheet.

The statistics are Bases Gained and Scoring.

The idea comes from football. I value total yards from scrimmage more than career rushing yards or receiving yards, and total touchdowns more than how the touchdowns were scored. Yes, Jerry Rice tops both lists, and almost all of the yards and touchdowns came from receiving, but not all. In addition, it’s not obvious to me that among running backs, the all-time rushing leader would also lead all running backs in total yards, because some running backs were more significant pass-catchers than others. (Yes, Emmitt Smith does lead all RBs in…