The Futility Infielder

I've been keeping some exciting news under my hat for the past two weeks. The night before I left for Seattle, I received an email from Joe Sheehan of Baseball Prospectus inviting me to join the Prospectus Triple Play rotation, writing a trio of team-themed teasers on a monthly basis. And while the Yankees were already spoken for, Joe even offered up a platter of teams that included the Dodgers. How could I say no?

For those unfamiliar, the Prospectus Triple Plays are free features, quick bullet-pointed hits that acquaint readers with BP's excellent suite of advanced metrics and lead them into the more heavy-hitting premium content. Along with the Dodgers, who are near and dear to my heart, my trifecta includes the Giants, the Dodgers' archrivals in the NL West, and the Twins, who've played the Yankees in the past two postseasons. The Dodgers have Paul DePodesta as their GM, and I'm fascinated by watching him apply some of the Moneyball tricks he learned in Oakland to a team with a larger budget. The Twins feature an impressive crop of young talent which is managed in ways that tend to confound the folks who thought Moneyball was the best thing since sliced bread, and the Giants, who... have Barry Bonds, who's sure to generate an endless stream of eye-popping stats as he closes in on Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron. There's really not a dud in the bunch -- though I need to brush up on the 24 guys besides Barry.

Anyway, I'm pleased to announce that my first Triple Play is up today. Though it runs without my byline, readers of this space will no doubt recognize me harping on about Yhency Brazoban's inclusion in the Jeff Weaver/Kevin Brown trade and my strategic use of the strikethru tag. Little ol' me, with a regular (albeit once a month) paying (a bit o' scratch) gig. How 'bout that?

• • •

Also on BP today, albeit in the premium section, is a good, solid refutation of Buster Olney's Productive Outs nonsense that we had so much fun with last spring. I had hoped a BP writer who could do play-by-play data analysis was willing to filet this particular sacred cow, and somebody finally has, with enough steak for everybody. Anthony Passaretti examined play-by-play data from 1999-2002 and quantified the incremental gains and losses -- "the little things" -- via the appropriate Expected Run Matrix.

The top team of that period, Passaretti found, was the 2002 World Champion Anaheim Angels, who added 23.2 runs above average by advancing runners on productive outs. The second-place team was the 2001 Seattle Mariners, who won a record 116 games; they improved their situation by 21.7 runs. Among the teams on the other end of the spectrum are the 2000 World Champion Yankees, who cost themselves 15.5 runs due to a lack of productive outs. And while the top 10 teams posted a better winning percentage than the bottom 10 teams, across all four years the correlation between runs from productive outs and winning percentage was a mere 0.16, "not even close to being significant," as Passaretti writes.

The meager magnitudes of those run totals should make one pause for a moment. A good general rule of thumb in sabermetrics is that a shift in 10 runs from one column to the other is worth one win. So the gain from those Angel runs is just over two wins, which ain't chickenfeed, but the 10th place team on that list, the 2002 Expos, is at 10.4 runs, roughly one win. The bottom 10 range from -19.5 runs (the 2000 Indians, who just missed a Wild Card spot by half a game) to -12.4 (the 2000 Tigers). That leaves 100 teams from those four years in the range of about plus or minus one win. It's a big deal if you're the 2000 Indians, sure, but hardly worth the commotion Olney set off.

Passaretti also quantified individual players' performance, publishing the top and bottom five for each of the four years. The highest total was Matt Lawton, with +8.8 runs in 1999, the lowest Dante Bichette, with -8.9 in 2001 -- close to one win in either direction, but most of the guys in those quintets are at about 5-7 runs, about a half-win. Johnny Damon made the top five in two of the four years, while Brad Ausmus made the bottom five in two of those years ("And you didn't think Ausmus could look any worse," quips the author). Oh, and the sainted Derek Jeter, who "does all the little things" as the McCarvers and Kays of the world are wont to remind us ad infinitum, shows up at -6.6 runs in 2001 and -5.4 runs total across the four years.

Passaretti then hammered one more nail into the case by analyzing whether productive outs are a repeatable skill. For each player with 50 or more opportunities, he checked their adjusted run performance with no outs and compared it to their performance with one out -- e.g., how well they advanced the runners in either case. His finding was a correlation of .01, which translates back into Enlgish as nuthin'.

So while we now have a better understanding of the number of runs at stake in those productive out arguments, we also know those numbers really don't add up to a hell of a lot in the end. Of course, it's still more likely that a particular productive out in some ballgame in June will catch the attention of the Olneys and Harold Reynoldses and John Kruks of the baseball world before that article will, but it'll be nice to have those numbers handy the next time one of those Flat Earth Society clowns crosses your path.