Baseball Prospectus dropped a bombshell on the stats community with a new offensive metric that they call Deserved Runs Created (DRC+). You know how wRC+, wOBA, and OPS+ provide solid catch-all snapshots? Guess what, DRC+ blows those numbers out of the water with its reliability and predictive power. BP is showing that DRC+ is as much as 2.5 times more reliable than wOBA. That’s actually kind of insane.
So the obvious question, then, is what does DRC+ think of Cubs hitters and what does that mean for their respective futures?
My biggest takeaway from DRC+ is that it actually thinks Kyle Schwarber was…get ready…better than Javy Baez in 2018.