Baseball Library: Mailbag: Sawing Down the Tall Tale of Small Ball

Or how I learned to smell a Baggypants Moskowitz quote with one clogged naris tied behind my back.

Dear Sir: Don’t you think that too many teams today concentrate on hitting home runs when they should be more focused on playing small ball, doing the little things to build runs, like moving runners along with timely outs and bunting in critical situations?

A few years back, ESPN introduced a statistic called the “Productive Out,” to support a contention that enjoyed popularity in some circles, the notion that teams overly reliant on the longball for scoring runs invariably finished behind clubs that played “smallball” by stealing bases and advancing runners with sacrifice bunts, hit-and-run plays, and what ESPN designated as “productive outs,” any out that moved a runner at least one base.

This creation received much attention at the time and some baseball writers frequently still cite it to explain the success or failure of various offenses. Last year, I heard Yankee radio announcers bemoan their team’s inability to play “ABC ball” (a strange acronym for small ball) and one of the announcers continually praised Jose Molina, the terrible hitting Yankees backup catcher, for how his knack of moving runners over with groundball outs, as if that were some sort of skill, when it was merely a demonstration of Mr. Molina’s inadequate hitting skills.

Most “small ball” devotees fail to notice that, season after season, teams that composed the top five in Productive Outs or, that other ESPN creation, Productive Outs Percentage, are usually among the lowest scoring, least successful clubs in baseball. Conversely, high-scoring juggernauts like the Boston Red Sox annually finish at or near the bottom of the Productive Out rankings.