And Now For Something Completely Different

So I spent a lot of time in the off-season trying to come up with a new statistic…PPA%, or productive plate appearance percentage.  Short version, it’s to calculate how productive players are offensively.  It’s an arbitrary ratio of how many successful plate appearances a player has had in relation to the amount of plate appearances they’ve had.  I count all hits, walks, advancing of runners, reaching base on error and sacrifices as successful, and for all the times they don’t do one of the above, it counts against them.

I’ll admit, I don’t have the time to necessarily track this for all teams, but I do plan on tracking it for the Detroit Tigers this year.  I’ll do my best to not bog this down with stats, but I will post the Tigers PPA% on occasion or reference it, so I figure it’s best to explain it now to eliminate confusion. 

Am I the first person to track this statistic?  I don’t know, but I’ve never been able to find it listed somewhere else.  The closest I’ve been able to find is Productive Out Percentage, but this also takes into account successes, not just failures.

For demonstration purposes, here is the PPA% of all Tigers from opening day.
Austin Jackson: .250
Will Rhymes: .250
Magglio Ordonez: .250
Miguel Cabrera: .750
Victor Martinez: .250
Ryan Raburn: .500
Jhonny Peralta: .250
Brandon Inge: .500
Alex Avila: .000

Hope everyone else is enjoying opening day weekend as much as I am.