SABERMETRICS AND SCRABBLE—VALUE OVER REPLACEMENT TILE.

SABERMETRICS AND SCRABBLE—VALUE OVER REPLACEMENT TILE. I have posted several times on the new baseball statistics. One of them is Value Over Replacement Player (VORP). This wikipedia article describes the concept: “how much a hitter contributes offensively or how much a pitcher contributes to his team in comparison to a fictitious ‘replacement player,’ who is an average fielder at his position and a below average hitter.” It turns out that, according to the Stefan Fatsis article, “Scrabble theorists have been calculating this stat—let’s call it VORT, or Value Over Replacement Tile—since the 1980s.” A blank tile has the highest VORT with 25 points. The lowest VORT is for “Q”, with minus 7.