Productive Out Percentage
From Wiki Gonzalez
Productive Out Percentage is a statistic invented by baseball journalist Buster Olney to track the rate of productive outs made by baseball teams. Olney claimed that better teams' key to success was a high POP.
POP = (productive outs) / (all outs)
When Olney's article "Smallball vs. Moneyball" appeared on ESPN.com in April 2004 to introduce Productive Out Percentage, it irritated Primates to a great degree. Their irritation was partly because they distrusted the entire concept of productive outs, but also because Olney noted that stathead darlings (and notorious postseason floppers) Boston Red Sox and Oakland Athletics were at the bottom of the POP rankings, while the New York Yankees had historically performed very well with an efficient offense predicated on advancing runners and putting them in motion. He thus posited that the fatal postseason flaw of "Moneyball" teams, compared to traditional teams like the Angels and Yankees, was their inability to make productive outs or play small ball at critical times to create runs.
Olney, who in a previous gig had been a Yankees' beat writer, was thus indirectly accused of being biased. He was also accused of rejecting sabermetrics in favor of a pseudo-stat which "quantified" baseball men's core anti-Moneyball theory: that a baseball team's success is primarily due to intangibles and doing the "little things." Primates were further irritated when Olney defended and continued to stand up for POP as the 2004 season wore on, even as the POP rankings (which ESPN.com tracked on its MLB statistics pages throughout the season) showed little correlation between POP and team wins.
In May 2004, Larry Mahnken investigated Olney's claims for POP in an article for Hardball Times by looking at actual postseason game logs. He found the statistic to be the epitome of bad statistical analysis, one concocted to support pre-established ideas instead of to test a hypothesis, and that the calculations didn't even support Olney's assertion about the Yankees -- in fact, the Series-winning teams of 1998-2000 had lower postseason POPs than the Series-non-winning teams of 2002-03.
The timing proved to be bad for Buster Olney's statistic, as the POP-poor Red Sox would stage a come-from-behind ALCS victory against those same Yankees in October 2004, and would end up winning the World Series. As of 2010, Olney is still a prominent journalist at ESPN, but Productive Out Percentage is mostly forgotten except as a running joke on Baseball Think Factory about Olney, dubious sabermetric statistics, and the combination thereof.
Also see: List of sabermetric statistics
[edit] References
- ESPN: Smallball vs Moneyball - Primer thread discussing the introduction of POP. (April 29, 2004)
- THT: The Truth About Productive Outs - Primer thread discussing the Mahnken investigation. (May 5, 2004)
