The Pastime

We’ve all been there. You’re at the game with your friends, someone brings up the idea of a productive out, and you can’t help yourself. You begin to tell them that it makes no sense to sacrifice bunt a runner from second to third with one out, but you can’t convince them. That’s why I’ve taken to carrying a small card in my wallet with the cumulative Run Expectancy information on it since 2000.

Yes, that makes me a baseball-loving dork, but I’m ok with that.

Anyway, what the heck am I talking about? Far smarter people than I — such as Tom Tango — have crunched the numbers and figured out just how many runs a team should be expected to score in certain baserunner & out combinations. For instance, if there’s a runner on second with one out, the team could be expected to score about .709 runs, but if the batter strikes out and puts the runner on second with two outs, the runs that team could be expected to score drops to around .342. Of course, you can’t score a fraction of a run, but it serves to illustrate how much that out hurt the team’s chance to score.

Here’s the combined data for 2000-2006:

And here are a couple handy charts for NCAA baseball, if you’re a fan of the college game, like me. I used Tom Tango’s complex calculator to generate the values in the inflated offensive environment of the aluminum bat.

Those numbers at the top (.292/.361/.420) are the average NCAA AVG/OBP/SLG for the last few seasons. Higher than you might have expected, aren’t they? Unrefined defenses, wildly disparate talent levels and the aluminum factor inflate the offense in the college game, though not nearly as much as it did in the mid-1990s.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 7th, 2007 at 2:11 am and is filed under General Baseball, Stats, Stat Graphics, NCAA Baseball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.