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GRABbing for GRIT

For our first foray into the world of Pseudometrics we are going to try to tanglibilize intangibles. As color announcers all across the land will tell you, there are just some things that can’t be measured. Whether they are running out every hopeless ground ball, diving whenever possible in the field, bunting early and often, or sliding head first into first base, you can’t help but admire the heart, the scrappiness, the grit of these diminutive giants of the game.

But who is the grittiest of them all? To find out, we’ll have to measure the immeasurable. To do this we have GRIT and GRAB. GRIT measures raw grittiness and GRAB is like a gritty batting average.

$GRIT=5\times(3B+HBP+SH+CS)+2\times(1B+SB)-\\3\times(K+SF)-(HR+2B+\frac{RBI}{3}+BB)$

Essentially, GRIT is gritty things (Sacrifices, getting caught stealing, getting hit by pitches)  minus non-gritty things (Power, striking out or walking, driving runs in) with some multpliers.  To see how much grit a player brings up to the plate we will divide GRIT by at bats to get GRAB.

 Rank Name AB GRIT GRAB 1 Juan Pierre 651 508.33 .781 2 Nyjer Morgan 509 185 .363 3 David Eckstein 442 142.33 .322 4 Scott Podsednik 539 152 .282 5 Elvis Andrus 588 161.33 .274 6 Julio Borbon 438 114 .260 7 Ichiro Suzuki 680 167.67 .247 8 Ryan Theriot 586 132.33 .226 9 Jose Reyes 563 121 .215 10 Cesar Izturis 473 91.67 .194 11 Omar Vizquel 344 65 .189 12 Jason Kendall 434 81.67 .188 13 Denard Span 629 115.67 .184 14 Rajai Davis 525 95.67 .182 15 Jose Tabata 405 73.33 .181

All of the usual suspects are here: David Eckstien, Elvis Andrus, Jason Kendall. But the real surprise is that Juan Pierre is a giant among giants. League average GRAB is around -.330 so having a positive GRAB makes one quite gritty indeed. Having a GRAB of .781 is an achievement that puts Juan Pierre in a class with Barry Bonds and Babe Ruth for complete domination.

Ichiro’s place in the top 10 is not surprising given his speed and lack of power. However, his grittiness often goes unmentioned. Perhaps because he is far and away the best actual ball player on this list.

That’s all for now, but don’t despair. There are more Pseudometrics in the works.