By The Numbers: Introducing Baseball's Cumulative Base Proficiency (CBP)

By Father Gabe Costa
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I just felt like playing with some statistics, so I came up with what I'm calling the Cumulative Base Proficiency (CBP).

I suspect this is not a new metric, but it was fun putting it together.

As you can see, I picked sixteen giants of the game, using the following career statistics: At-bats (AB), walks (W), total bases (TB), stolen bases (SB), caught stealing (CS) and hit-by-pitch (HP). I defined the Cumulative Base Proficiency (CBP) as follows:

Finally, the CS totals for Cobb, Foxx, Hornsby, Ruth and Wagner are simply unknown. However, given the magnitudes of the other terms, the CBP is not greatly impacted. For example, Ruth has a CBP of 0.752, assuming he had 117 CS. If we add 100 more CS, giving a total of 217, his CBP only drops to 0.743.

So what do you think?

Well, what do you think? Let Fr. Gabe know in the comments below!

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• MLB
• Ty Cobb