A decade ago, when I was writing about the Rockies — a small market baseball team that didn’t have enough resources to fill every spot in the lineup with production — I created a nerd metric called “Drag Factor” designed to highlight how much their lousy bats were holding back the club’s overall offensive production. It doesn’t just measure how much guys suck at the plate (wRC+ takes care of that just fine), but it also scrutinizes how many of these infertile plate appearances the team is allowing into the lineup each night.
For my fellow nerds:
The exact equation to calculate Drag Factor is as follows:
Drag Factor = ((100 - wRC+) * Plate Appearances) / Team Total Plate appearances
1) An individual’s Drag Factor can be calculated with the equation above.