The Stat That Will Revolutionize Baseball: Introducing UVI

To get it, first you divide 1000 by the park factor (NOT THE PARK FACTOR BY 1000!!!). Take that number (let's call it x) and multiply it by the batter's singles, doubles, triples, and homers. Thus:

Second-order singles: (First-order singles)*x

Second-order doubles: (First-order doubles)*x...etc. for triples and HR.

Then just plug the new numbers into the first-order formula.

Third-order hitting UVI 

Third-order UVI adjusts for the batter's level and home park. For MLB players, second and third-order UVI are the same.

Essentially, third-order UVI is the result of changing the following attributes: singles, doubles, triples, homers, walks, strikeouts, stolen base percentage, HBPs, and GIDPs. Yeah, that's right, I let them keep their bunts and sac flies.

Minor league translations are very much an inexact science.

I guarantee none predicted Hanley Ramirez to be so good so fast. Same with Ryan Braun. Therefore, I'm not going to give the exact numbers I use for this, because your guess is as good as mine, but I'll basically tell you how it works.

Each one of those attributes has a coefficient assigned to it. Then, to get the third-order stat, you do something like this:

Third-order singles = Coefficient^(levels away from majors)*Second-order singles

Therefore, if you use a coefficient of .9, that means an AAA hitter gets .9 of their singles, an AA hitter gets .81, a High-A hitter .729, and so on. Therefore, this tells you how many singles they would have gotten had they played in a neutral park in the majors.

Like I said, it's tough to really nail down good coefficients because of all the weird career paths in the minors, so there's no sense in telling you the exact ones I use, because they're just educated guesses. Still, a lot of the numbers, when I run them, look pretty accurate, so I'm confident that there aren't any destructive flaws in what I'm doing.

So yeah, that's hitting UVI.

Pitchers

Pitching UVI works quite a bit differently. Some major differences between hitting and pitching UVI are:

1.) Hitting UVI tells you what a player has done; pitching UVI tells you what a pitcher should have done.

It draws on Voros McCracken's DIPS theory to take the elements of luck out of pitching.

2.) Pitching UVI doesn't include baserunning against.

The main reason for this is simply because I don't have baserunning against data. Also, this is really a function of the catcher more than the pitcher, so it would skew things.

It took me the better part of two years to figure pitching UVI out to a level that satisfied me, whereas hitting wasn't too hard. It's pretty complicated, so here's how it works:

All you need to know to calculate a pitcher's UVI is the following: IP, H, HR, BB, K, HBP, and GB%. In return, my system spits out the following: Expected IP, Expected Hits, Expected WHIP, Expected ERA, Expected BABIP, Expected BAA, Expected OBPA, Expected SLGA, Expected OPSA, and Expected UVI.

Several years ago, Voros McCracken proposed DIPS theory, which states that a pitcher has no control over balls in play and that the only things a pitcher can control are walks, strikeouts, and home runs allowed. 

Not quite.

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