So, it looks like The Boss got his man.

In Jason Giambi, the Yankees will have their best-hitting first baseman since Lou Gehrig.

How much better does he make them? How many more wins will he put on the scoreboard than Tino Martinez?

We'll leave Giambi's clubhouse inspiration out of the discussion and start with Runs Created. This figure factors in all the player's hitting and basestealing statistics to arrive at a number of "runs" the player has generated. If you add up individual Runs Created totals for a particular team, you very closely approximate the team total of runs scored.

We keep track of Runs Created here at ESPN.com, and have Giambi at 173 and Martinez at 94.

Stats Inc. publishes a more sophisticated total in its "Major League Handbook 2002" that considers a player's performance with runners on base. They have Giambi at 156 and Martinez at 94.

It should be pointed out that neither of these figures factors in home ballpark or playing time. Giambi and Martinez both played in 154 games, although Giambi had more plate appearances, 671 to 635.

Let's do two things: We'll use the Stats Inc. formula since this gives us a more conservative number and we'll convert Giambi's Runs Created total to 635 plate appearances. This leaves the new totals as:

Giambi: 148
Martinez: 94

That's 54 runs. That's a lot of runs. How many? The average American League game in 2001 saw 9.72 runs scored. That total means about every 10 runs (added or prevented) is worth an extra win for a team. Since Giambi was 54 runs better than Martinez, we divide by 10 and see that Giambi was worth about 5.4 wins more than Martinez.

Except one thing we didn't consider is that Giambi, in creating those runs, uses fewer outs than Martinez. In his 671 plate appearances, Giambi made 368 outs (342 at the plate, 9 sacrifice flies, 17 double plays). In his 635 plate appearances, Martinez made 440 outs (424 at the plate, 2 sacrifice flies, 12 double plays, 2 caught stealing).

Since Giambi makes fewer outs (while creating more runs), it also means more opportunities for his teammates to add runs of their own.

Of course, we haven't yet touched on a couple things.