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.

You've probably already seen some pitch fx posts on the Front Page and in the Fanshots concerning games played in Major League Ballparks, but there's a lot of other WBC games going on. So let's use this Fanpost to discuss anything you find statistically interesting, to comment during games, or anything else WBC related.

I'll start us off:

Mexico wtf

Certainly more interesting then that title...

OK this was on 2/22 but it was like 2/23 in China when it was posted so it counts. Harry linked to an awesome study involving Chase Utley's hit locations and proper defensive formation behind it.

CHONE power rankings were posted, with a lot of interesting fanfare (Padres 2nd in the west, top 3 teams all from AL East?

BA's Top 100 Prospects came out, with Matt Weiters topping the list.

philkid3 showed us that MLB Network will be slow in accepting the sabermetric revolution with their comments on this video Fanshot.

larry linked us with Fangraphs BABIP home/away splits, which in turn had MattS post an interesting study he did regarding home/away splits of a lot of different factors

PECOTA looks like it's due for an ageism lawsuit.

The quality/capabilities/uncertainty with regards to the future of reporting are brought up in the Fanshot on the Rocky Mountains News closing shop

And two good fanshots late last night, one from jhmoore on the correlation between fip-era and team uzr (it's high as you'd probably expect) and another from baetown415 of Rally's historical WAR of the past 50+ years.

Keep the fanshots coming guys, I like how that section of the site is growing. I know it's sometime's tough to find in the bottom right corner of the page, but there's also the spot in the title bar to use with displays them front and center in all their glory.

And keep expecting posts like this once or twice a week to highlight them, as even myself, the dungeon master of the BtB Fanshot section, sometimes misses out on some good ones.

Any way I can make that title any longer?

As a fan of statistics, one thing that always interests me is an anomaly. As a fan of sabermetrics, one thing that interests me is questioning commonly held baseball beliefs, such as the need for pitchers to mix their pitches. Mariano Rivera's 2008 was a perfect blend of these two interests and frankly I'm surprised I haven't heard more about it. You would think out of all the teams a New York Yankees pitcher would have garnered more headlines or a few more than just 3 third place Cy Young votes. But for some reason Mo's 2008 season hasn't received the credit I think it deserves.

His stat line for 2008:

Stats bolded for utter ridiculousness. I don't know how far you have to go back to find a K:BB (12.83!!!) of that magnitude for someone who's pitched at least 50 innings, I couldn't find anyone within 2 K/BB of it in the past decade. The WHIP is also just sick, not much else needs to be said about it. Batters simply did not reach base much against Rivera.

But it's not Rivera's stat line that makes him an anomaly, especially since it's not that far removed from his career numbers. What made Rivera's 2008 so different was his nearly complete reliance on one pitch to achieve it, and it wasn't even a traditional fastball. I'm talking of course about what some have dubbed the greatest pitch in the history of the game, his cutter.

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Continuation of my last post on LHB being struck out on pitches away, only this time focusing on RHB.

Last time we learned that LHB have been getting a lot of strikeouts called against them on what appears to be a good few inches outside of the strike zone. What naturally follows, and was asked quite a bit about in the comments section, was how are RHB treated in the same situation? If they're getting the same strike zone at least it can be argued they're being treated equally, even if it's not really correct.

How much are RHB being struck out away?

This much:

It's 332 times, a little less than 1/2 the amount of Kc to LHB (674) in the same 1+ feet away from the center of home plate. As you can see it's very dense closer to 1, with very few outliers. In fact there's really just one strike that's way out there, almost a good foot away from the end of the strikezone. It's a bit annoying since otherwise the farthest strikeout to a RHB was 1.62 feet away, which line up almost perfectly with my 1.61 number from the LHB experiment. Speaking of which, here's the side-by-side comparison of the two:

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Before we begin I want readers to know that I understand the minutaie of such a topic. Originally this was going to be a post on the full count, but the ridiculous of one of my charts made me decide to look at this phenomena instead.

From my last post on the Oakland A's strike 3s looking and some other work I've got in the pipeline (here's a preview), I've noticed a disturbing trend with regard to left handed batters. They're being rung up a ridiculous amount of the time on pitches not just away, but way away. Here's what I'm talking about.

(Remember this is from the catcher/umpire perspective)

The black line represents 10 inches to the left of home plate, which is what I've seen referred to as the very edge of the strike zone. To account for a couple inches of error in the data as well as balls that may have crossed the strikezone farther in the y dimension (say a slider from a RHP that crosses home plate 5 inches behind the front of the plate where pitch f/x measures from) I've only taken the strikes that pitchfx said were centered at 1 foot to the left of home plate or farther left.

I'm also only concerned with pitches within the top and bottom of the batter's strikezone. If an ump is missing a ball both low and away, he's probably hopeless anyway. In this exercise there were only 10 Kc that were both high/low and away, so umps are pretty good with the knees to the letters rule. The ball grazes the edge of home plate rule, eh maybe not so much.

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