More Intuitive ERV

Tangotiger over at the blog for THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball points out that Carl Crawford's steal of home earlier this week was a very smart play, as he risked relatively little for a bigger gain. A few weeks ago I pointed to a interview with Jamie Moyer that revealed that he had an intiuitive understanding of the costs and benefits of men on base that matched the ERV table.

Bill James in his New Historical Baseball Abstract came up with a rough way to estimate "intelligence" of a ballplayer from the basic baseball stats. A more direct way of measuring that might be to assess different decisions of players based on the risk/reward as determined by Win Value or Win Expectancy or some other measure. Baserunning presents clear examples of such instances, but I bet there are others.