THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

When I was at STATS, I wrote a real-time boxscore generator program.  I loved the box scores it produced on an old style text 80x25 screen.  It was most like the ESPN Box with the two teams side by side with update BA, OBP and Slugging percentages.  The box had everything, including runners advanced on outs, updated pitcher ERA and BA allowed.  I loved those boxes.

The nice thing about the side by side is you can compare lineups easily.

I prefer the box scores at USA Today because they all appear on one screen.  It comes closest to replicating the experience of reading the box scores in the morning paper (still not the same obviously) and avoids the need to click from game to game.

I agree, side-by-side is my preference.

I wish i could rank them rather than vote for just 1. I think that’d be more interesting to see how people would rank them and do a borda count on it. Still, the poll is good. ESPN’s is king IMHO.

I’m a fan of ESPN’s in general, but I think the batted-ball info that FanGraphs provides is such a huge value-added that I voted for them. Not a huge fan of their’s overall, though, so if another added that in, that’d become my favorite.

I’m unclear as to how the Fangraphs’ example even counts as a box score.

By which I mean, they don’t break down information by inning, and you have to hunt just to find the score and result.

A box score is, at minimum supposed to provide cheap basic summary of the game that can be gleaned at a glance, with more information if one digs deeper. That’s the difference between a stat sheet and a box score. Fangraphs gives us the former, calls it the latter.