No, this isn't an argument about the Hall of Fame chances for Andruw Jones and Jim Edmonds. Rather, this is my goodbye to Beyond the Boxscore.

Though I've only been here for a few months, they've been really fun ones. I want to thank R.J. Anderson and Sky Kalkman for taking a chance on some guy whose only previous contributions to the site were a couple of MS Paints. I also want to thank Dan Turkenkopf, Chris Quick, Harry Pavlidis, and Erik Manning for all their help and coming up with increasingly awesome graphs. Much thanks to Athletics Nation for their numerous ideas in their comments, as well as frontpaging my work and helping me get noticed. And finally, I want to thank all the readers and commenters out there, commenters especially.The site improves greatly when you criticize our work, and though its nice hearing compliments when I write something, criticisms are even better, as they often lead to even more ideas.

Now since these things always end in a bit of sagely advice, here's my go. I think most of you have probably heard the Glengarry Glen Ross bit about the ABC of sales, Always Be Closing. Well I live by the ABQ of life, Always Be Questioning. Never just accept what you hear or bow to conventions, always think about why something is the way it is, and if it can be improved. Remember it was thought for a long time that RBIs and Fielding % were the best measures of offense and defense (and probably still in too many places really), and only after someone questioned these beliefs were we able to see that's not the case. It's similar to a Jamesian approach to baseball, which seems to have worked out pretty well. Always be questioning what you read, what you hear, and even what you yourself do. You'll only be better off for it.

Hey hey, my my.

There's going to be a decent helping of math later in this article. You've been forewarned.

Edit: MattS with an excellent comment on why most of what I did was wrong. That said I still believe the concept itself is interesting (others do too apparently) and the math is all correct, so I still think it's worth a read. Just don't treat the final results as anything applicable to real baseball.

The full count has always been my favorite count, mostly because the next pitch (if not fouled off) has to determine the outcome of the PA. My favorite base state is when the bases are loaded since there's no open base for the pitcher to just walk the batter. What happens when you combine those two and then toss up two outs on the board to boot? Besides a boatload of insanity, I'm not really sure, but I think we can try using some game theory to tell us what should be happening.

What's Game Theory?

One of the things that has always interested me in life is game theory and its applications. Wikipedia defines everything much better than I can, but basically game theory boils down to making the best choice given the decisions other players have made. Military, business, poker, even relationship (what girl doesn't like a date's plans being broken down into a normal form game?) decision makers use (or they should) game theory to derive at the optimal decision. Baseball shouldn't be much different.

Is this Even Practical?

Well, it depends on what your definition of "is" is. Naturally, we're going to run into some problems. This game I'm conducting assumes pitchers have total control over where they are placing the ball, when they probably do not. In fact, there's likely a good amount of selection bias towards pitchers with less control since we're looking at a 3 ball count to begin with. I also assume the batter doesn't know if the ball is in or out of the strike zone when he decides to swing at the pitch. This is probably most of the time really, but there are certainly times where the batter does know that the incoming pitch is out of the zone, like the one hit by pitch that occurred in this situation last year.  But in practice a lot of game theory games don't play out like they should anyway, yet it's still useful to look at the theoretical outcomes.

(Aside: I'm not sure if any pitchers consciously do anything like this, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did. Most have probably heard of Brian Bannister's sabermetric tilt, but I would love to have an interview with Greg Maddux to see if he did anything like this. Greg, if you're reading this, my email is in the link on my name.)

Alright, I'll play your game. How do we set it up?

Remember, we're only dealing with the 2 out, bases loaded case in this article. The run expectancy of this state per BP's 2008 RE Chart is .799, which I'm gonna call .8 for easier calculations. I feel like this is an even "simpler" game than the full count in general, since if the pitcher throws a ball in this case he's going to allow a run, which he almost certainly doesn't want to do. But that doesn't necessarily mean he shouldn't ever throw the ball outside the strike zone either.

Huh? you may be thinking after that last sentence. Why would a pitcher ever want to intentionally throw the ball out of the strike zone in that situation? The answer is because the batter thinks the pitcher would never throw a ball out of the zone in that situation, so he's more likely to swing at any pitch, in which case he's a lot less likely to be able to do damage on a pitch out of the zone (I assume, haven't actually seen some in zone/out of zone slugging charts yet). This is the essence of game theory, using what your opponent thinks you're going to do to your advantage. Hopefully this chart will make things a bit more clear:

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Uhhhhhh, or so I've heard? There were a couple of high traffic fanshots recently, in case you missed them:

centris linked us to his run value based on location in a strikezone plots. Very pretty heat maps, and some interesting questions arise from where the best spots to throw the ball are for pitchers.

BraveBronco0121 took the new BtB standard Historical WAR graph and looked at Andruw Jones vs Carlos Beltran. The graphs expand in the comments to include Jim Edmonds and other CF. It will be very interesting to see what voters think when these guys start qualifying for the HoF.

Colin Wyers shares the first part of how to start a Retrosheet Database. Very easy to read and follow, I've already implemented it after struggling to get one going from various sources before. Thanks a bunch Colin.

Part 1 and 2 of Peter Jensen's series at THT on building a fielding metric using Gameday data. I'm a big fan of the methods and information people use becoming public info (this new metric, WAR) as opposed to proprietary (+/-, VORP). I know it can be harder making money when all your info is out in the public, but so much more can be accomplished when you have everyone working together.

Of players who had at least 140 PA in 2008, Nick Johnson ranked lowest in swinging at pitches out of the zone at 10.0%. Pablo Sandoval ranked highest at 53.8%. These are their pitch charts on pitches out of the zone, red being pitches they swung at, blue pitches they took. For kicks, their contact rates on these pitches were 71% and 79.4% for Johnson and Sandoval respectively.

The "strike zone" top and bottom is an average of the sz_top and sz_bot of all the player's PA per pitch fx. This is why it may look like some of the out of zone pitches are in the strike zone.