Formal Definition of SMS
	I define the Stan Musial Statistic in the formula below using the following abbreviations: D: number of doubles hit T: number of triples hit I: number of inside the park home runs hit XD: number of times thrown out at second trying to stretch a single into a double XT: number of times thrown out at third trying to stretch a double into a triple XI: number of times thrown out at home trying to stretch a triple into an inside- the-park home run SMS = D + 2*T + 3*I - 2XD - 3*XT - 4*XI SMS is simply a count of the number of extra bases hitters achieve without benefit of an outside-the-park home run minus a corresponding penalty for being thrown out on the bases trying to extend hits.  Due to the limited availability of data for I, XD, XT and XI, I have developed an alternative formula which I call approximate SMS defined below. SMSapprox = D + 2*T With approximate SMS, we simply ignore inside-the-park home runs and the number of times a player was thrown out on the bases.  I don’t know if approximate SMS materially differs from actual SMS, but under ideal circumstances the effect of inside-the-park home runs and times thrown out on the bases would cancel each other out making approximate SMS close to actual SMS.  Intuitively, however, I expect actual SMS to be slightly smaller than approximate SMS in most cases.
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