"Last week in a thought exercise, I wondered if who we could expect more out of this year – Delmon Young or Ben Revere. One offensive, one defensive. One defensively laughable, one offensively infuriating. So let's look, sabrmetrically, at what each should be worth offensively and defensively next year.

Offense

I like using a very basic sabremetric stat to measure offensive production for players: Bill James' Runs Created (or RC). Basically James discovered that by looking at the number of walks, hits, doubles, triples, homeruns and at-bat a team had, he could give a pretty good estimate of how many runs they scored that year. Then he used that same formula for players.

(If you're looking for more on Runs Created, I did a short story on it back in April you might want to check out. That theory is that basis for a huge chunk of the sabremetric work out there. It also started the alphabet statistical soup that people like to mock. If you want to be able to explain the basics of this stuff to people, it's a good start.)

Runs Created has been through all kinds of formulas and there are all kinds of pet derivations for it. I'm going to just pull mine from ESPN.com for both players.

"