THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

What an elegant concept—one I doubt many people have really thought through fully. This is the kind of thing that should really be required of all major league organizations and gone over so thoroughly that the third base coach doesn’t even have to think of it when the situation arises.

I trust that most major league coaches have a pretty good idea how likely any given runner is to score on any given play (to a far greater extent than any outside observer), but I doubt enough of them have something as detailed as this to make that information as useful as possible to them.

Nice work.  One complication to consider is the outfielder’s incentive to throw.  With 0 outs, runner on second, and single, running only pays if success rate is 95%.  But let’s say the expected success rate based on the runner, OF arm, and hit location were 85%.  In that case, it doesn’t pay for the OF to throw home, as giving up the extra base to the hitter costs more than is gained by throwing out 15% of the runners.  So the runner’s real probability of success is close to 100%.