A New Metric of High Unimportance: SCRAP

It’s something we hear all the time: “He’s a scrappy player” or “He’s always trying hard out there, I love his scrappiness.” Maybe chicks don’t dig the long ball anymore; maybe they’re into scrappiness. I’m not really in a position to accurately comment on what chicks dig though, so I don’t know.

Even from a guy’s perspective, scrappiness is great. It’s hard to hate guys that overcome their slim frames by just out-efforting everyone else and getting to the big leagues. It’s not easy to quantify scrappiness, though. Through the years it’s always been a quality that you know when you see, but there’s never been a number to back it up. Until now.

Scrap is a metric that is scaled on a similar scale to Spd, where 5 is average and anything above that is above average, and anything below 5 is below average. Here are the components that make it up (each component is factored onto a Spd-like scale, assigned a weight, and then combined with all of the other components to give a final number).

• Infield hit% — Higher is better.
• .ISO — Less power means more scrappiness.
• Spd –The ability to change a game with legs.
• balls in play% — (PA-BB-K)/PA — Go up there looking to fight.
• zSwing%. — Higher is better. Measures willingness to defend the zone.
• oSwing%. — Lower is better. These guys can’t hit the low and away pitch to deep center.
• zContact%. — Higher is better. These guys swing for contact.

Without further ado, here are the Scrap rankings of all qualified batters in 2013.

#	Name	Scrap
1	Alcides Escobar	6.31
2	Eric Young	6.27
3	Leonys Martin	6.25
4	Jacoby Ellsbury	6.24
5	Starling Marte	6.23
6	Jean Segura	6.19
7	Ichiro Suzuki	6.13
8	Alexei Ramirez	6.13
9	Elvis Andrus	6.08
10	Denard Span	6.08
11	Jose Altuve	6.08
12	Erick Aybar	5.93
13	Adeiny Hechavarria	5.9
14	Daniel Murphy	5.9
15	Brett Gardner	5.89
16	Carlos Gomez	5.89
17	Gregor Blanco	5.87
18	Michael Bourn	5.8
19	Alex Rios	5.76
20	Will Venable	5.72
21	Norichika Aoki	5.7
22	Jimmy Rollins	5.64
23	Shane Victorino	5.63
24	Michael Brantley	5.63
25	Howie Kendrick	5.63
26	Gerardo Parra	5.61
27	Nate McLouth	5.58
28	Nolan Arenado	5.54
29	Torii Hunter	5.53
30	Austin Jackson	5.53
31	Chris Denorfia	5.52
32	Jon Jay	5.52
33	Brandon Phillips	5.5
34	Alejandro De Aza	5.48
35	Dustin Pedroia	5.45
36	Darwin Barney	5.45
37	Ian Desmond	5.42
38	Starlin Castro	5.42
39	A.J. Pierzynski	5.4
40	Eric Hosmer	5.39
41	Asdrubal Cabrera	5.39
42	Josh Hamilton	5.39
43	Alex Gordon	5.39
44	Adam Jones	5.38
45	Coco Crisp	5.35
46	Andrew McCutchen	5.34

47	Marco Scutaro	5.34
48	Ian Kinsler	5.33
49	Andrelton Simmons	5.33
50	Desmond Jennings	5.32
51	Jonathan Lucroy	5.32
52	Chase Utley	5.3
53	Brandon Belt	5.3
54	Hunter Pence	5.26
55	Jason Kipnis	5.22
56	Ben Zobrist	5.21
57	Alfonso Soriano	5.2
58	Pablo Sandoval	5.19
59	Manny Machado	5.18
60	Brian Dozier	5.18
61	Matt Holliday	5.17
62	Brandon Crawford	5.17
63	Allen Craig	5.15
64	Matt Carpenter	5.14
65	Michael Young	5.13
66	Yunel Escobar	5.12
67	Yoenis Cespedes	5.11
68	Yadier Molina	5.11
69	Nick Markakis	5.11
70	Zack Cozart	5.1
71	Mike Trout	5.1
72	Nate Schierholtz	5.08
73	Todd Frazier	5.07
74	Michael Cuddyer	5.07
75	Domonic Brown	5.06
76	Chase Headley	5.03
77	Salvador Perez	5.03
78	Marlon Byrd	5.02
79	James Loney	5.0
80	Neil Walker	5.0
81	Kyle Seager	4.97
82	Andre Ethier	4.97
83	Freddie Freeman	4.96
84	Mike Moustakas	4.95
85	Robinson Cano	4.95
86	Jed Lowrie	4.95
87	David Freese	4.92
88	Shin-Soo Choo	4.91
89	Adam LaRoche	4.91
90	Chris Johnson	4.88
91	Martin Prado	4.87
92	Carlos Beltran	4.86
93	Ryan Zimmerman	4.85

94	Victor Martinez	4.83
95	Justin Morneau	4.81
96	Adrian Gonzalez	4.8
97	Anthony Rizzo	4.79
98	Alberto Callaspo	4.79
99	Trevor Plouffe	4.79
100	Ryan Doumit	4.77
101	Brandon Moss	4.74
102	Mark Trumbo	4.74
103	Matt Wieters	4.7
104	Josh Donaldson	4.69
105	Adrian Beltre	4.69
106	Justin Upton	4.68
107	Daniel Nava	4.67
108	Paul Konerko	4.65
109	Billy Butler	4.65
110	Matt Dominguez	4.64
111	Jayson Werth	4.62
112	Russell Martin	4.62
113	Jay Bruce	4.62
114	J.J. Hardy	4.6
115	Joey Votto	4.59
116	Buster Posey	4.59
117	Dan Uggla	4.57
118	Nick Swisher	4.55
119	Kendrys Morales	4.52
120	Carlos Santana	4.51
121	Pedro Alvarez	4.49
122	Mark Reynolds	4.48
123	Jedd Gyorko	4.48
124	Paul Goldschmidt	4.47
125	Prince Fielder	4.47
126	Edwin Encarnacion	4.45
127	David Ortiz	4.45
128	Adam Lind	4.4
129	Jose Bautista	4.38
130	Justin Smoak	4.37
131	Miguel Cabrera	4.37
132	Mitch Moreland	4.36
133	Joe Mauer	4.34
134	Evan Longoria	4.24
135	Chris Carter	4.23
136	Giancarlo Stanton	4.1
137	Mike Napoli	4.09
138	Troy Tulowitzki	4.07
139	Chris Davis	3.94
140	Adam Dunn	3.81

That’s quite a bit to look at. Here are a few of my takeaways:

• The general perception of a player’s scrappiness is pretty close to what this metric spits out.
• There are some surprises, such as Tulo being near the bottom. In his case it’s caused by an extremely low speed rating and a low z-swing%.
• Little dudes that run hard tend to be scrappy (duh).
• Big oafy power guys tend not to be scrappy (duh).
• Upon removing the qualified batter restriction the ‘Scrap’ leader is Hernan Perez. Tony Campana is a close second. I think we can all agree that Campana is more or less the definition of scrappiness.

This isn’t a stat that’s going to forever change how we view baseball. But this does give us a way of quantifying, however imperfectly, a skillset that we haven’t been able to before. Now we not only know that Jose Altuve is scrappy, we know just how scrappy he is. I’ll let you decide how important that is.

If you have any suggestions regarding different ways to calculate Scrap let me know in the comments. It’s a metric that requires a good amount of arbitrary significance since, well, what does it even mean to be scrappy? We’ve always had an idea, and now we have a number.

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The idea for this metric was spurned on by Dan Syzmborksi on this episode of the CACast podcast, somewhere around the 75-minute mark.