Baseball Musings
Baseball Musings
August 07, 2004
Productive Outs are Still Outs

I was just over at the ESPN.com Baseball statistics page to look at the Beane Count, and noticed that their link for productive outs is in bold. I followed it to the team page, and what did I find? Their is one team in major league baseball that is heads and shoulders above the other in productive outs. Not only does this team's batters have the higest percentage of productive outs, but their pitchers have the lowest percentage of productive outs allowed! This must be the greatest team in the history of baseball! They're productive on both sides of the ball!! What powerhouse is so good at productive outs?

The Montreal Expos.

I rest my case.


Posted by David Pinto at 02:00 PM | Statistics | TrackBack (0)
Comments

To paraphrase Mr. Ed: "An out is an out, an out of course."

Posted by: Linkmeister at August 7, 2004 03:04 PM

I don't know of anyone in the game who cares about Productive Outs, except the idiot who wrote the article.

Posted by: Al at August 7, 2004 03:24 PM

Bruce Fields

Posted by: Larry Mahnken at August 8, 2004 10:21 AM

I agree that an out is an out, but obviously there is such thing as a productive out - which I think we can agree doesn't hurt as much as, let's say, a double play.

The qualifier to this statistic is "OPP - Total Outs in potential Productive Out situations." Montreal has the lowest OPP, which most likely correlates to the few baserunners that the 'Spos have.

So PO% is a part of the puzzle and it will reflect a certain type of team - read: NL teams. Tampa Bay, a team not known for its power, is the only AL team in the top 10.

Real mashing teams like the Yankees, Red Sox, Oakland aren't putting their chances in the hands of small-ball, advance-the-runner tactics.

This chart would be well served to have a third column that shows what happened when it wasn't a productive out - was it a hit, was it a non-productive out?

Later.

Posted by: Matthew Carroll at August 9, 2004 02:26 PM