One of the best things about baseball is that there is a statistic for everything, and it’s a true data nerd’s game. Want to know who has the 10th longest streak of consecutive games with a single since the year 2000? You can find it. (It’s Luis Castillo) Want to develop your own methodology for determining who the best defensive infielder is? There’s a society that can help you.

But with all the advanced statistics that are en vogue, I thought it would be interesting to look at some of the fundamental events in a baseball game. Namely, outs. Every non-shortened game has at least 51 outs, many having 54. Multiplied by 2,430 games in a 30 team league’s 162 game season, it gives us over 125,000 outs per season to look at. That’s a lot of data.

With the help of Retrosheet’s play by play files and David Temple’s instructions on how to load the files into a MySQL database, I was able to compile a table of every out made since 1952 and the scoring on the play. Now, because of some formatting issues, the scoring isn’t always 100%, especially in the “fringe cases” where bizarre things like rundowns, runner interference, multiple errors on one play. As an example of this, the database roughly shows the correct number of triple plays since 1952 (259 vs SABR’s 263 count) but the scoring indicates that there have been 11 unassisted triple plays by center fielders, which would be awesome if true, but is not. Usually these cases result from the data cleanup I did where comments were removed, so if you see something too weird, it’s likely just a data issue. However, overall numbers seem to line up pretty well with whatever independent verification I could do.

Surprisingly, the first thing that stood out to me was that the center fielder unassisted is the most frequent out-generator besides the strikeout. I would’ve suspected it would be one of the middle infielders, though when you sum up their ground balls (6-3, 4-3) and their lineouts/pop outs (6, 4) both are higher than the CF numbers, which makes a little more sense. Center Field largely only makes outs on pop outs and line drives, though in the data we do see three instances of 8-3 putouts .

Also interesting to note is that 98% of out plays come from 28 different scoring combinations. The other 2%? Over 1,200 combinations, including some beauties like the old 4-3-6-3-2-5-8-3 double play, and the 9-8 putout (which has happened three times!). So next time you see a funky rundown, appreciate that you may be seeing something that’s relatively rare, especially if it’s a long one. Only one six-player play has happened twice: the 4-3-6-3-6-1 double play.

Additionally, of the nearly 1.5 million strikeouts that have happened since 1952, only 22,500 (1.5%) have required a throw down to first base for a 2-3 putout. Of those 1.5 million Ks, six have started off a triple play, while 9,352 have turned into double plays, including 261 who caught a runner attempting to steal home.

And while looking at this, I noticed that quite a few of these combinations could be birthdays. Most of you born in the first six days of the months of March to June find their birthday being a rather frequent scoring decision, but even those born on September 13th have had their birthday as the scoring result (twice!). Those with two outfield positions in their birthday unsurprisingly do not fare too well, but I would recommend you take a peek down at the raw data below and filter down your birthday, you may be surprised!

When I went to compile how many times each position “touches” the ball in an out, the chart looks like I would expect it to, but again it is surprising how involved the center fielder is, touching more balls than the third baseman:

So with all this, what would a common game of baseball look like if we were to apply these averages? Something like this (all numbers are per team):

6 strikeouts

3 line/fly outs to center

2 ground outs to second

2 ground outs to short

2 line/fly outs to right

2 line/fly outs to left

2 ground outs to third

1 ground outs to first

1 ground out to the pitcher

1 line/fly out to second

1 line/fly out to short

1 line/fly out to third

1 infield double play (either 5-4-3, 6-4-3, or 4-6-3)

1 of the following: A groundout to the first baseman with the pitcher covering, a pop out to the catcher, or a 5-4 fielder’s choice

As always, here’s the raw data. Take a look and let us know about any interesting things you find!