Its good,great in fact. But its hard for anyone except stat-junkies to understand, and its damn near impossible to explain.

I assume irishgit is referring to the Tech-1 formula of RC, which is very hard to understand, and also hard to explain by itself. But I never even use any of the Tech versions of RC when calculating. At the top of this page, under About Runs Created, is the basic formula. It works almost (and I mean almost in a statistical sense, within 1%) as well as the full-fledged Tech version, but the ease of use is definitely worth the slight loss of accuracy. As for explanations, it's pretty simple when you look at the basic formula: RC estimates how many runs a player, by himself, would have produced in the amount of outs he consumed. Well, how does one produce runs? By getting on base, for one thing. That's the (H + BB)/(AB+BB) part; looks a lot like the formula for On-Base %, doesn't it? The other way to create or produce runs is by advancing runners. That's the part with Total Bases, which factors in how well a player is slugging (and thus advancing runners). Combined, Runs Created can be thought of as how much a player would score if he could get on base, and then drive himself home. But where are Stolen Bases?, you ask? Like I said earlier, the basic version isn't quite as good as the version that incorporates SB's in, but only by a small amount. This tells us that the stolen base is so unbelievably overrated by announcers, writers, managers, etc. that few people have ever taken the time to ask, how effective is this strategy? As it turns out, not very. But I digress. I hope this explanation made it a little easier to understand what I belive is the single best baseball stat around.