THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Isn’t this somewhat obvious?  Caught foul balls use up an out.  So, more caught foul balls means less everything else except caught foul balls.  Wouldn’t there also be a negative relationship between foul area and ... walks, singles, home runs, etc.?

Of course, the relationship would be stronger re: strikeouts, because a non-caught foul ball is often a strike.  But still.

In play foul balls are counted for DER and BABIP.  If you have many more or less than average it would skew your numbers from the usual, so you would want to make a park adjustment to these stats and their components, as well as to K’s.

Yes, the relationship is obvious, but not the degree of that relationship.  Which is really what the job of the saberist is about.

We all kinda know how things kinda sorta work.  And the saberist tries to get things in a more quantitative fashion.

We know that players get worse as they get older… but how much worse?  etc, etc…

Tango/3: fair enough.

What we might also want to know is the effect on all other events when a PA is not ended by a foul out.  In other words, if you are doing component park factors where the denominator is PA minus foul outs, how much are all the other components affected by the fact that there may be more or fewer strikes (depending on the size of the FT)?

Tom,
As an amateur statistician, writer, and ball-player, I’m glad to hear you buy in to the logic, as well as the analysis.  My real point in the whole matter was to support my hypothesis that the Inidans’ staff of 64-68, setting season and multi-season strikeout records, would have struck out even more hitters.  They might even stuill hold the single season record for SO, had they not pitched in 43,700 sq. ft.-foul-area Cleveland Municipal Stadium!  To get the rubber stamp from a card-carrying sabermetrician makes the effort worth while!