10 things to know about the best (and worst) base producers
What do Juan Soto and Nicky Lopez have in common? Not much....
Doug Melvin, the onetime general manager of the Milwaukee Brewers and Texas Rangers, put it best. “You can’t win the game without moving the pieces on the board,” he said. “It’s all about capturing bases.”
That’s the reason why BPO — bases per out — is such an important statistic. It encompasses every base that a batter gains for a team. Hits, walks, hit batsmen, stolen bases, even sacrifices — they all count. The resulting total is then compared to the outs made by the same hitter. The higher the resulting ratio — that is, the higher the BPO — the more efficient the batter.
The only problem with BPO is our lack of familiarity. We know that .300 is a strong batting average (BA), but how many bases should a batter reach per out?
The highest BPO generated by all batters within a given league (since the onset of the so-called Modern Era in 1901) was .796 by National Leaguers in 1930. No surprise there. That was the famed season of the lively ball, the only time when the collective BA for either league topped .300. The NL hit .303 as a whole in 1930, and five clubs did better than that, topped by the New York Giants at an amazing .319.
The all-time worst BPO had been posted a generation earlier, when American League batters reached only .568 bases per out in 1908. There again was a strong correlation with batting average, as you might expect. Only one AL club — Ty Cobb’s Detroit Tigers — batted better than .245 that year.
So those are the parameters that history has set for us. A BPO over .800 is clearly excellent, while a figure below .600 is abysmal. Batters split the difference last year, finishing with a major-league BPO of .707.
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The 2021 season is almost upon us, a perfect time to collect a few final impressions about run production a year ago. Here are 10 things worth knowing:
1. Juan Soto was 2020’s undisputed BPO champion. The 21-year-old left fielder for the Washington Nationals reached 155 bases while making only 103 outs, resulting in an astronomical BPO of 1.505. That was more than twice the big-league benchmark of .707. (The catch, of course, is that Soto played only 47 games over 2020’s truncated schedule. Can he sustain such brilliance over a full season? We’re about to find out.)
2. Fourteen other batters finished with four-figure BPOs of 1.000 or better. (I’m limiting this discussion to hitters who made at least 186 plate appearances, the minimum to qualify for the batting title.) Two Atlanta Braves — Freddie Freeman and Marcell Ozuna — were the runners-up to Soto at 1.272 and 1.187, respectively.
3. And what about the American League? Its BPO champion last year was Cleveland’s Jose Ramirez at 1.106 bases per out.
4. Raw sums would be a second tool to compare base production, but there’s a problem. Baseball already has a stat that is somewhat confusingly called total bases (TB), even though it actually includes only the output from singles, doubles, triples, and home runs. That’s inadequate for our purposes, so let’s simply use TB as one component of our formula. Freeman was 2020’s overall champion with 187 bases. Here’s the math: 137 TB + 45 walks + 3 hit batsmen + 2 stolen bases = 187.
5. The runners-up in bases were Ozuna with 184 and Ramirez with 178. Soto finished well back with 155. The young Washington star began the 2020 season on the Covid-19 injured list and later suffered an elbow injury. He missed 13 games in all.
6. And the worst BPO among qualified batters? It belonged to Nicky Lopez, the second baseman for the Kansas City Royals. Lopez reached only 68 bases while making 144 outs, yielding a BPO of .472. That put him a full 235 points below the big-league average.
7. Atlanta flashed the most potent offense in the majors in 2020, no real surprise for a lineup that featured three batters with four-digit BPOs: Freeman, Ozuna, and Ronald Acuna Jr., who finished at 1.153. The Braves’ collective BPO was .825.
8. The world champion Dodgers (.811) were the only other team to exceed .800. The San Diego Padres came close at .798, the third-best BPO in the big leagues last year.
9. Pittsburgh posted the worst record a year ago — only 19 wins against 41 losses — and weakness at the plate was a key factor. The Pirates finished with a truly anemic BPO of .576, putting them 33 points below the next-worst Texas Rangers (.609).
10. One last look at the difference between excellence and ineptitude: The Braves and Pirates made virtually the same number of outs last year: 1,569 by Atlanta, 1,574 by Pittsburgh. But the gap between their outputs was truly enormous. The Braves piled up 1,294 bases, compared to just 906 for the Pirates. That’s the difference between a divisional title and the worst record in baseball.
It turns out that Doug Melvin was right.