In the "Hey, Bill" section I received a question from one of the Mikes:

Hey Bill! If you apply the formula for Abe Lincoln Scores to team performance, rather than individual, does it hold up as an accurate way of measuring offensive output? In other words, do teams with high Abe Scores put up more runs than teams with lower Abe Scores?

Well. ..yes, of course, but the real question is how many more runs?

            Since 1920 there have been 1,982 major league teams, including this season.    Suppose that we sort those into four groups of teams:

            A)  The 200 teams with the highest Abe Lincoln Scores for hitters,

            B)  The 1000 teams with the higher ABE Scores for hitters,

            C)  The 1000 teams with the lower ABE marks, and

            D)  The 200 teams with the lowest Abe Lincoln Scores. 

            Of course, groups "B" and "C" overlap slightly, but we don’t care.   If we form these groups:

            The "A" teams (the teams with the highest Abe Lincoln Scores for hitters) had an average won-lost record of 87-67, and scored an average of 5.25 runs per game,

            The "B" teams had an average won-lost record of 81-74, and scored 4.77 runs per game,

            The "C" teams had an average won-lost record of 74-81, and scored 4.19 runs per game, and

            The "D" teams had an average won-lost record of 66-84, and scored 3.90 runs per game.  

            The real question is how do these scores compare to other hitter-rating systems, to which the answer is "not all that well", but.  ..we’ll get to that later.

            Abe Lincoln scores work both for hitters and pitchers, and the data for pitchers is essentially the same in reverse.   The teams with the best Abe Lincoln scores for pitchers averaged 3.91 runs allowed per game; the second group averaged 4.19, the third group 4.77, and the fourth group 5.31.

            Let’s look briefly at the best and worst teams.   The best teams for hitting (Abe Lincoln Scores) were the Joe McCarthy teams.

            Actually. . .small confession. . .I don’t have Hit Batsmen in this data, from either side.   I figured this data without the hit batsmen.   But the highest Abe Lincoln Score ever for a team (hitters) was the 1949 Red Sox.    Ted Williams and Vern Stephens, both members of the 1949 Red Sox, tied for the league lead in RBI with 159 apiece, so you can guess that that’s a team that had a pretty good offense.   The top ten teams of all time contain eight Joe McCarthy teams—the 1948-1949 Red Sox and the Yankees of 1931, 1932, 1933, 1936, 1938 and 1939.   That’s a familiar thing; whenever you draw up a list of the greatest offensive teams ever, you always get a bunch of Joe McCarthy teams.   The two non-Joe McCarthy teams on the list of the highest Abe Lincoln scores are the 1950 Yankees and the 1947 New York Giants.    The 1948-1949 Red Sox drew 823 and 835 walks—the only two teams to draw 800 walks in a season.  That’s what pushes them to the top of the list.

            The lowest Abe Lincoln Score for a team was by the 1968 Mets.   These were their regulars:

            They scored less than three runs a game.   Bud Harrelson drove in 14 runs in 400+ at bats.

The best Abe Lincoln score by a team’s pitchers was .921, by the 1966 Dodgers.   We’ve talked a lot about that team over the years. . .starting rotation of Koufax, Drysdale, Don Sutton and Claude Osteen.   I’m sure most of you know that team.

            The top 12 teams of all time, from a pitching standpoint, include three Dodgers teams of the 1960s (1963, 1966 and 1968) and five Braves teams from the 1990s—the Maddux/Smoltz/ Glavine teams.   The other four teams are the 1988 and 1990 Mets (Gooden/Fernandez/ Darling/Cone/Ojeda/Viola), the 2002 Diamondbacks (Schilling and Unit), and the 2003 Dodgers (Gagne, Kevin Brown, Hideo Nomo).

            The worst pitching of all time?  The 1936, 1950 and 1955 A’s.   The 1950 A’s—the absolute worst—had a strikeout to walk ratio of 466 to 729.  They won 52 games, lost 102, and had a team ERA of 5.49.   But I like the fact that they were able to nearly duplicate this performance after they moved to Kansas City in 1955, just to prove that it wasn’t some sort of park illusion.

            Of course the Abe Lincoln method identifies good teams as good teams and bad teams as bad teams; that’s a very low standard, and it doesn’t take much to meet that.   The implied question there is how ABE compares to other metrics, and the answer is that it doesn’t.   Abe Lincoln Scores are less useful, as a predictor of runs scored in a season, than batting average, certainly less than on base percentage or slugging percentage.

            The question I started with is whether you could evaluate hitters or pitchers with reasonable accuracy just based on a very few bedrock statistics.   Obviously you can’t do as much with four low-level categories as you can with a larger number of higher-level "outcome" statistics that take advantage of after-the-fact knowledge of whether the hard-hit balls were hit at somebody or were hit into the gaps.   The value of the Abe Lincoln method isn’t that it does a great job of predicting short-term or single-season outcomes.   The value of the method is that it focuses the most "real" outcomes, which enables it to see through the luck to the skills underlying.   The method recognizes Roger Clemens as the best pitcher in the league even when he is 10-13 with a 3.63 ERA and his General Manager thinks he is fat and lazy.   It recognizes Walter Johnson as the best pitcher in the league even when he goes 8-10 with a 3.13 ERA.   That’s what makes it interesting.

            And also, it enables us to look at pitchers and hitters on the same scale.  On the team level, we can combine the "hitting" Abe Lincoln score and the pitching score into a single term in this way.   The system is one-based; the average score for a team, through baseball history is 1.014, essentially one.    We can combine the hitting and pitching scores into an overall team score, then, by this method:

            3 times (Home Runs minus Home Runs Allowed), plus

            Walks/Hit Batsmen minus Walks/Hit Batsmen Allowed, plus

            Strikeouts by Pitchers minus strikeouts by Hitters. 

            I think you can figure out intuitively why the two systems would be combined in that way. . .I hope you can, anyway, because I’m not going to explain it.  We’ll call that the Abe Lincoln Team Plus/Minus score; average score is zero.   The ten greatest teams ever, by that approach, were:

            The 1932 Yankees out-homered their opponents 160 to 93 (+201), out-walked them 766 to 561 (+205) and struck out only 527 times while their pitchers struck out 780 (+253).   Their Abe Lincoln Team Plus/Minus score is +659.   They won 107 games.

            One more thing I should do before I close.    These are the top 20 Abe Lincoln Scores in the majors right now, for hitters:

            And these are the scores (through Monday) for all hitters now qualifying for the batting title.   Players who are doing much better in Abe Lincoln Score than in OPS are marked with Green Highlight; players who are doing much worse are marked with Red:

            One more note, and then I’m done with Abe Lincoln.   I mentioned that the 1966 Dodgers had the best Abe Lincoln score ever for pitchers, as a team—but as of now, the 2011 San Francisco Giants are ahead of them.