Brewers KUG Leaders (UPDATE: All-Grit Team KUG)

Ever since the Kendall Unit of Grit was originated, we've been trying to quantify what makes a gritty player. It has been done once already. We also have the Unified Theory of Grit, which attempts to determine the effects of GRIT on players and their teams.

So, today, in attempting to quantify the seemingly unquantifiable, I developed a spreadsheet of the Brewers current stats and came up with a formula for the Greater Rankings of Individual Tenacity, or GRIT for short. Here's the basis for the formula... not the whole thing, just the basis for raw GRIT number:

SF + SH + HBP

minus

HR + IBB + GIDP + SO

The counting stats listed on the top are things that gritty players do. They lack talent and instead of doing productive, efficient things like getting extra base hits or drawing intentional walks, they prefer to sacrifice themself or risk injury by allowing themselves to be hit by a pitch to reach first base.

The other two factors in the raw GRIT Number are GIDP and strikeouts. Gritty players rarely hit the ball hard enough to have a double play turned on them, and they hustle down the line hard enough to avoid most double plays as well. They also aren't apt to strike out, as they would prefer to hit the ball softly than swing hard and risk missing.

The raw GRIT number, however, is not a very effective way to determine GRIT. For one thing, every player's raw GRIT number was in the negatives. Therefore, I added adjusted GRIT (or GRIT+) by adding 100 to each player's total.

The process is far from complete, there are two more factors that go into the final Kendall Units of GRIT.

The first will be called inefficiency rate. The formula is (2B+3B+HR) / (Total hits). This penalizes players who are efficient by getting extra base hits and rewards players who inefficiently get mostly singles. 

I wanted to multiply the inefficiency rate by the Raw GRIT+, but the numbers were backwards! Therefore I inverted the inefficiency rate by the formula (1- inefficiency rate). Then I multiplied the Raw GRIT+ by inefficiency rate.

But the process is not quite done. A final factor to be considered: gritty players lack the strength to hit the ball in the air, so they often hit it on the ground. So the final step is to multiply inefficiency-adjusted Raw GRIT+ by the player's ground ball rate.

Both percentages lowered the raw GRIT+ by a fraction, and the end results gave each player a number, their official Kendall Units of Grit. I know the anticipation is killing whoever is reading this, so here's the first half KUG leaderboard:

2008 Brewers KUG GRIT Leaders

Unsurprisingly, Kendall, Counsell, and Kapler lead the GRIT leaderboard. Good players are clustered near the bottom; Ryan Braun comes in with a stunning negative KUG number.

Rickie Weeks makes a surprising showing, but when you consider his unusual ability to get hit by pitches and high GB%, it makes sense. Russell Branyan has a ridiculously low 25% GB rate, but he is hurt by his lack of plate appearances in which to hit home runs in.

By the way, I did not just make these numbers up, I have a 50 row spreadsheet file to prove it! It's set up so I can update the KUG rates in a month or two to see how GRIT progresses throughout the season.

Greater Rankings of Individual Tenacity Update!

I decided to run the numbers on the Brew Crew Ball All-Grit Team, to compare Brewers to the rest of the league and see if any members of the All-Grit team are actually not that gritty. Here are the results:

Byrnes and Rowand are clearly the outliers on the squad. Rowand's gritty running-into-walls catches aren't captured in the Greater Rankings of Individual Tenacity because these are immesaurable.