November 23, 2004

Assessing Productive Outs

Little Things Mean a Little

by Anthony Passaretti

This past April, ESPN.com's Buster Olney introduced a new statistic, Productive Out Percentage, to the baseball public. Working with the Elias Sports Bureau, Olney attempted to create a metric that would support the idea that productive outs were a key element in winning baseball. While the sabermetric community swiftly debunked Olney's creation as flawed--there's no relationship between the quality of a team's offense and its tendency to make productive outs--one question remained unanswered: how valuable are productive outs relative to other offensive events?

Productive outs, such as ground balls that advance runners, have a small benefit relative to outs that do not, such as strikeouts and pop-ups. Certainly, moving a runner over is preferable to not doing so, and over the course of 162 games, occasional bases gained can add up. What they add up to has never been quantified, but thanks to the new widespread availability of play-by-play data, however, we now have the opportunity to do so.

Defined simply, a productive out is any out on which a runner advances. Its run value, then, can be discerned from Baseball Prospectus' Expected Runs Matrix. Consider the most common bunting situation--runner on first with no outs--using 2002 data:

Base/Out    Exp. Runs
1st/0 out    .8998
2nd/1 out    .6904
1st/1 out    .5407

As its value lies in runs added above an unproductive out, the productive out here has a run value of .1497.

We can now look at the play-by-play data for the most recently available seasons, 1999-2002, using Ray Kerby's Astros Statistical Software. We need the following pieces of information for each batter/team:

• Runners on each base when an out was made
• Runner advancement on the play
• Outs in the inning
• GIDP

The first team mentioned in any discussion of productive outs is the 2002 Angels, so let's use them as an example. That lineup made the first out of the inning 322 times with a runner on first. 91 of those runners (28.3%) advanced, versus the league average of 20.4%, meaning the Angels advanced about 25 runners more than an average team would have. The run value of moving a runner from first to second was .1497, which equates to 3.8 runs.

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