What does the Brewers offense need to do to improve? I considered this very question some time ago, arranging the issue in a series of questions about the Brewers 6 major core players between the ages of 24 and 30. That post contains a good amount of year-to-year data, which is nice, but it's lacking something:

Context.

It seems to me that with the loss of Sabathia and Sheets, various rotation projections could put the Crew anywhere from 30-50 runs behind the 2008 pitching staff; maybe less, maybe more. It is also my opinion that even with Sabathia and Sheets, the rotation likely does not improve upon their 2008 marks, and the end result is the same: we're looking for extra runs from the offense.

While some might mourn losing the Brewers' healthy 750 RS, 689 RA runs differential, we can learn from utilizing a Pythagorean Record projection that replacing 50 RS in either direction results in a rather minimal difference in expected wins; whereas the Brewers' 2008 expected winning percentage was .5385 -- based solely on runs scored and runs allowed -- a 2009 exoected winning percentage with a runs differential closer to 800 RS, 739 RA yields an expected winning percentage of .53602. In terms of 162 games, those winning percentages display the difference between an 87.24 win season and an 86.84 win season.

So, my question in the last few weeks was simple: how do the Brewers score 50 more runs?

My initial thinking about this issue centered around the fact our entire young core -- minus Hardy -- regressed in 2008 from their 2007 performances, sometimes in large quantities (this is especially true for Fielder and Braun in one sense -- they couldn't possibly repeat the luck of their 2007 campaigns, and it is also true for Hart, Hall, and Weeks in a different sense -- Weeks' late-season explosion was probably unlikely to be sustained for a longer period of time, and Hart and Hall maintained habits that were not conducive for long-term hitting success).

The result of this line of thinking had me searching for "grand" outcomes. Who could increase their OBP from a .340 range into a .365 range? Or get that slugging up another 3% or 4%...

The only trouble is, in terms of baseball statistics, a 3% or 4% difference in one category is rather large. This is true for individual and team stats; for instance, the fantastic Cubs (855 RS) and awful Padres (637 RS) were separated by a 3.7% difference in the OBP category (.354 vs. .317). We probably feel the same way about Chase Utley vs. Rickie Weeks, Matt Holliday vs. Carlos Beltran, Carlos Beltran vs. Mike Cameron -- you get the picture. Each of these players have an OBP differential somewhere between 3% and 4%, and that's just my eyeballing stats and picking players off the top of my head.

So, I started to think about a way to build a more realistic, level, and less-optimistic projection of the offense that still maintained the premise of improving runs production. Luckily, I happened to be reading through The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (New York: Free Press, 2001) for a second time; a particular comment of his, about runs created, spurred me forward:

"A hitter's job is not to compile a high batting average. A hitter's job is not to maintain a high on-base percentage, not to create a high slugging percentage, not to get 2000 hits. A hitter's job is not to hit home runs. Some hitters might hit home runs as the primary part of their job, but only some hitters, and even those only some of the time..." (James, 2001; 329).

James is correct:

"The objective of each team is to win by scoring more runs than the opponent" (MLB Official Rules, "Objectives of the Game," 1.02).

I could easily sit here and cite to you numerous shifts in BABIP (Batting Average on Balls in Play) for the Brewers' youngsters, coupled with their shifts in Balls in Play %, and the impact those luck factors will have on OBP and SLG and AVG for players such as Braun, Fielder, Hardy, Hart, and Weeks. I can explain to you why I think Braun and Hardy are most likely to regress in 2009, Hart and Hall most likely to improve, and Prince Fielder most likely to explode in 2009.

But you could still ask, "how do the Brewers score 50 more runs?"

So, I came to runs created. Runs created is a series of various formulas created and revised over time, initially conceived by James, in order to project the runs production of a particular player. Which makes sense; we can easily and readily cite a player's AVG, how many HR they hit, and their RBI; but we'd be lost for words if we were asked about their runs production.

All you need to know about runs created is that it basically conceives scoring runs in terms of producing runners (or getting runners onto the basepaths, and keeping them there) and advancing runners (once they are on the basepaths). Producing runners and advancing runners occurs in concrete opportunities to produce and advance runners -- basically, this concept allows us to analyze H, BB, HBP, CS, SB, SH, SF, TB, and AB in a dfferent way, with a different objective in mind: projecting runs production.

There are multiple runs created formulas, and it's not necessary to know them all here. I used the "technical" version for this survey, simply because it was readily available on Baseball-Reference player pages, and I could easily correct the data for my survey by calculating the runs created of the 2008 Brewers as a whole (using team stats), calculating runs created of the 2008 Brewers as an aggregate (adding different Brewers together), and comparing that data with the actual runs scored of the 2008 Brewers.

This is a wonderous fact about the 2008 'Crew -- we know how many runs they scored, exactly (750), and we can thus correct the runs created projection. In his 2001 Abstract, James notes that most teams in history fall within 5% of runs created projections, with certain teams deviating for various reasons. The Brewers' deviated more than 5% of their RC projections in 2008, probably because of the dearth of situational hitting coupled with the overall prevalence of extra base hits. If there is a discrepency between extra base hits and situational hitting, that will show up in a formula such as RC, given that Total Bases (TB) is utilized as the basis of advancing runners (along with SB, SH, SF, and BB) -- if a team posts a high TB total due to a high number of extra-base hits, but continually fails to execute a single or a sacrifice fly in situations with a high-probability for scoring actual runs, that difference will eventually be recorded in Runs Created if it occurs frequently.

So, here's one calculation -- the 2008 Brewers' starters, bench, and pitchers (while batting) created 813 runs, which is .92251 of the 2008 Brewers' actual runs scored 750. One of the methods that James suggested that spurred me forward is the following correction of runs created, which suddenly made the formula incredibly useful for the specific projection of projecting an improvement in 2009 for the Brewers:

"But isn't it possible, someone wonders, that on this team that has 700 runs created, and only 680 runs scored, some players actually created MORE runs than our estimates show? Of course it's possible; in fact, it's inevitable. We're not making the estimates perfect; we're only making them better. If a team scores 680 runs but has 700 runs created, we know that the average player on this team is 2.9% less productive than our best estimate shows. If we reduce all the estimates by 2.9%, we will be making some of them more accurate and some of them less accurate. What we can be absolutely certain of is that those we are making better out-number those that we are making worse" (James, 2001, 331).

Now that we have a method for projecting runs created, and a method for correcting those estimates and projections, we can ask a question about the little things: what if the 2009 Brewers improve because no member of the offense explodes, produces a career season, or produces at an outstanding level; what if the 2009 Brewers improve because of minute changes here and there in their approaches, their games, and their luck?

I want to analye the following issue: with a few hits here, a few less caught stealing there, a couple more sacrifice flies thrown in, perhaps a couple of walks, maybe a few more extra base hits...how much can the Brewers' offense improve?

Which is to say, how many runs will they create in such a scenario?