Yesterday Mark Simon posted this article to ESPN explaining that the Mets are doing something so positive, so well that we are making the rest of the league look silly.
What are they doing? UBR!
…what?
Yes, this seems like the most hipster of all of the hipster sabermetrics, but it stands for Ultimate Base Running (also BSR). Its calculated for doing positive things on the bases like taking an extra base, stealing but not being caught, not doing something stupid and being called out, etc. It attempts to calculate how many runs the base running alone has contributed. Here are the top 5 teams in the league:
1. Mets 15.3
2. Royals 8.9
3. Indians 7.6
4. Pirates 7.6
5. Rockies 7.0
We are above and beyond the best at this. Mark Simon points out that for the Mets, taking the extra base has been the critical for the Mets this year and reflecting on that there have been a lot of times watching that I’ve commented or someone else has commented something to the effect of “Way to take the extra base.” Now while a lot of this is intuition, I think Terry deserves a lot of credit for this. It was one of his initiatives to take the extra base this year in spring and it has been paying off in this objective stat about the Mets baserunning abilities this year.
Now if you look at the teams with the Mets, the Rockies are also a team not heading towards meaningful games in September this year. It is important to remember though that earlier this year they were at the top of the West division, so there seems to be some correlation that good UBR means competitive teams. For the Mets, a lot of their UBR has come from Eric Young (so this hurts the objective stat for Terry argument) and the Mets have been competitive since he has joined.
