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A few years ago, a couple of serious statisticians devised linear weights, a system of defining how many runs a player "creates" in a very specific and accurate way. Bill James initially invented "runs created" as a statistic that measures total bases times on base percentage. Linear weights got much more complex, and is not an easily calculable statistic, but it does correlate with team wins better than any other regular statistic. According to those statisticians, the following run totals are accumulated:

 

Walk = 0.33

Single = 0.47

Double = 0.78

Triple = 1.09

Home run = 1.4

 

Something, though, very quickly jumps out, and that is that the difference between each type of hit is 0.31, or roughly the same as the value for a walk. In other words, these weights can be broken down like this:

 

Walk = 0.33

Single = 0.33 + 0.14

Double =  0.33 + 0.14 + 0.31

Triple = 0.33 + 0.14 + 0.31 + 0.31

Home run = 0.33 + 0.14 + 0.31 + 0.31 + 0.31

 

And if we define 1 to equal a rough value of about 0.31, we get:

 

Walk = 1

Single = 1.5

Double = 2.5

Triple = 3.5

Home run = 4.5

 

It appears that we can get values similar to linear weights if we just measure the number of bases the player accumulated and give him another 0.5 credits for getting the hit. In other words, we might be able to measure player performance by adding his total bases plus walks plus half his hit total. Or, in abbreviated form, TB + BB + H/2. This statistic, which is somewhat an estimate of the value of a player's base accumulation, when applied to teams correlates better with wins than does James' "runs created" or on base percentage plus slugging average since 1998. In addition to its use as a simplification of linear weights, it can also roughly be reached by deriving on base percentage plus slugging average. After all, both measure a player's ability to get on base and to accumulate many bases per time at bat. Therefore, because of its ease of calculation and accuracy, I use it often as a benchmark statistic.