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Rob Bowen headshot

Players · B · C · 2008 regular season

Rob Bowen

Age
27
B/T
S/R
Height
6' 3"
Weight
235 lb
Born
February 24, 1981 in Bedford, TX, United States
MLB debut
September 1, 2003

Compare with…

dbWAR
.5
Regular season, 2006–2008 only
PA
98
AVG
.176
OBP
.219
SLG
.286
wRC+
29
100 = avg

Rob Bowen was a catcher for the Oakland Athletics. In 2008 he hit 1 home run and knocked in 9 RBIs, notching 16 hits across 98 plate appearances in 36 games. His batting average was .176, 33.3% lower than the league average of .264. He reached base at a .219 clip and slugged .286, for an OPS of .504, 32.7% lower than the league mark of .749. He made contact on 63.0% of his swings. Adjusted for his ballpark and league, his 29 wRC+ puts his offence 71% below average. That comes to -0.5 dbWAR — -8.5 runs with the bat, +0.1 for the ballpark, -0.0 on the bases, -0.3 on double plays, +1.4 for the position he plays, against replacement level. It includes no fielding: defensive runs are proprietary and are not estimated here, so the figure credits playing a demanding position but not playing it well.

League context

Percentile among qualified batters, 2008 regular season.

wRC+29
wOBA.228
ISO.110
BB%4.1%
WAR-.5

How the WAR is built

Runs above replacement, 2008. These terms sum to -4.6 runs, divided by runs-per-win to give WAR. There is no fielding term.

Batting-8.5Ballpark+0.1Baserunning-0.0Double plays-0.3Position+1.4Replacement+2.7
BattingBallparkBaserunningDouble playsPositionReplacement

WAR by season

0.70.1-0.5060708

Batting Regular season

Standard and advanced, by season. Regular-season games only — postseason games are listed separately below. Seasons on file run 2006–2008; his career began in 2003, and earlier seasons are not in this data yet.

Trend
2008OAK369816190438.176.219.286.110.2884.1%38.8%.228-8.529-0.5
2007SD/OAK/CHC551883641812761.231.344.372.141.34414.4%32.4%.322-2.1980.7
2006SD751102331301326.245.339.394.149.30311.8%23.6%.330-0.61000.3

Separate from the regular season

Postseason Postseason

Wild Card through World Series. These games are counted on their own: none of them are in the regular-season tables, career totals, league context, leaderboards or dbWAR on this page.

Postseason batting

Postseason Rob Bowen's postseason batting, by October and round. Not part of any regular-season figure on this page.
SeasonTeamRoundGPAABRH2B3BHRRBIBBSOSBAVGOBPSLGOPS
2006 PostSDNLDS1110100000001.0001.0001.0002.000

Box-score and rate statistics only. wOBA, wRC+, FIP and dbWAR are measured against a full league season, and a postseason is a few teams playing each other for a month, so they are not computed for October.

Platoon splits

How he hits left- and right-handed pitching.

Batting by the hand the pitcher throws with, 2008. Counted from play-by-play, so totals can differ from the box-score season line by a plate appearance or two.
SplitPAABHHRBBSOAVGOBPSLGwOBAK%
vs LHP323050115.167.194.200.18146.9%
vs RHP6661111323.180.231.328.25134.8%

Spray chart

Where every ball he put in play landed, 2008.

Loading 55 batted balls…

Hot and cold zones

Batting average by pitch location, 2008.

.125—.231——3 AB—2 AB—5 AB.08312 AB.30010 AB—5 AB.3758 AB.1119 AB—5 AB
Below averageLeague averageAbove average
Batting average by location of the pitch that ended each plate appearance, catcher's view. The bordered square is the strike zone; the outer band is chase territory. Cells with fewer than 8 at-bats are left grey rather than shown as signal. League average on the same attribution is .263.

Situational hitting

How Rob Bowen hits by base state, outs, score and late-game pressure — each read against his own season line.

Split by
By who is on base when he comes up. The season line is repeated as the baseline.
SituationPAABHHRRBIBBSOAVGOBPSLGwOBA
All situations98——————.176.219.286.228
Bases empty5148511325.104.157.229.176
Runner on first · thin221940014.211.286.263.260
Runners on47431108113.256.289.349.287
RISP252470809.292.292.417.311

Runners on includes runners in scoring position, which is the convention every reference uses. Rows under 25 plate appearances are marked thin — at that size a rate moves several dozen points on one hit. Counted from play-by-play, 2008.

Not in the 2008 data: exit velocity and launch angle, first recorded in 2015. The play-by-play goes back to 2005, but the measurements on each pitch and batted ball arrived later, so the panels built from them are left off this season.

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How these are computed

wOBA uses linear weights measured from this season's own play-by-play rather than published constants, and wRC+ is park-adjusted against that same league. dbWAR is our own open implementation — not fWAR or bWAR — and the full derivation, including its simplifications, is on the methodology page.