Mark: I like what Keith Law had to say on this subject. Law: “There are no productive outs. Just discard the term. Unless a run scores directly on the play, an out nearly always puts a major dent in your run expectation for the inning. So GMs who take productive outs into account are … bad GMs.” I also read him in a chat once say something along the lines of… the benefit of a truly productive out is so little it isn’t even worth measuring.

There are maybe very very very special cases at a critical time with the right guy on deck and the right guy on base, etc, when they are worth while. But, over the long haul, outs are highly unproductive regardless of what they accomplish.

Tom, I see your point, too.

Most positive events are already accounted for in other measures. Sacrificing doesn’t count as an AB, HBP counts for your OBP, etc. The only thing missing are the outs in which a runner advances but the hitter didn’t square around, and those may not be common enough to be statistically meaningful.

There’d also be plenty of noise. Man on first, batter takes a full cut and the ball bounces thirty feet in the air. Batter out at first, runner advances to second. Giving the batter credit for a positive result in those cases would be like giving a student a passing grade because he spelled his name wrong at the top of the test paper.

It sounds a little like Win Probability Added, which measures the impact of every play on the team’s chances of winning. WPA isn’t great for predicting future contribution, though.

You and your readers may find these articles on the topic interesting:

Run Estimation for the Masses (THT)
The great run estimator shootout (part 1) (THT)
Baseball Prospectus Basics: About EqA