Petecrow defies traditional stats, so we made one for him
PCA's extra-extra bases need to count for something, the Sox are f'ing up the Wild Card and the Cubs kinda screwed David Bote



Get more from Andy Dolan in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the app
Over on the once useful website known as Twitter, Matt Clapp was noting that as good as Petecrow Armstrong gets at the plate, his slash line will never adequately reflect his impact because it won’t factor in the speed with which he gobbles up extra bases once he’s let loose on the base paths.
Longtime intrepid readers will remember that I once created a baseball statistic to better contextualize the offensive prowess of former Barves and Cubs and many other teams’ catcher Henry Blanco. Long before he was a World Series winning bullpen coach for the Cubs, good old Hank White was a great defense, not so bueno offensive player. In fact, when he got to the Cubs in 2005 his career batting average of .216 was the lowest in baseball at that time for any current position player with more than five years in the big leagues.
And yet, after watching Hank dominate a few Cacti League games that spring, I knew what Michael Lewis was trying to tell us in “Moneyball.” Batting average was for dipshits.
But I wasn’t satisfied with what Billy Beane’s nerds like Paul DePodesta were working on. Their stats were still too outcome based.
I borrowed something from one of the baseball’s all-time greats, Bob Uecker. In his (I assume) Pulitzer Prize winning autobiography “Catcher in the Wry,” Uecker said that when he was a player he calculated his own batting average and credited himself with hits if he hit a ball hard even if he was out on it or every time he hit a really good foul ball.
I expanded the formula for Hank to include both of those, but also if Hank took a pitch and looked like he’d really wished he’d swung at it, or if he swung and barely missed.
I put all of that into a complicated mathematical formula and called it HWEqBA. Short for Hank White Equivalent Batting Average.
In 2005, Hank hit for the second highest average of his career (though, actually I’m not sure his 2-for-5 in 1997 with the Dodgers qualified him for the batting title at .400). He hit .242 for Dusty Baker’s awful Cubs, but even that didn’t tell the real tale. HWEqBA knew that Hank had really hit .887. That would have won the batting title by more .510 points over some hack named Tony Gwynn.1
Pre-HWEqBA, Hank hit .216 in the big leagues. Post-HWEqBA he hit .231. Though it was really more like .743.
So what does any of this have to do with Petecrow?
His late season surge at the plate has gone on long enough now that it seems real and not just a hot streak. And he’s not just hitting singles.
Check out the improvement in his expected sluggling (xSLG) this year.

The red line is league average, and late season Pete is waaaay over that.
But like Clapp said, even that doesn’t tell the whole story. Why? Because when Pete singles unless there’s somebody on in front of him (and because Dansby bats in front of him, there rarely is) you can basically just add a base to any hit he gets because he’s going to steal.