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Wednesday, April 13, 2005

Foul Outs

While watching the Yankees-Red Sox game tonight on ESPN I was interested in the Rick Sutcliffe's comment that a foul ball that landed in the seats behind third base would have been caught in other parks such as Oakland Coliseum. I've looked at some quantification of foul outs before in relation to homeruns but thought I'd run the numbers myself using play-by-play data for 2003 and 2004.

Without further ado, here are the numbers of foul outs in decreasing order in those two seasons where FO3 means foul outs behind first base etc....


FO3 FO5 FO2 FO9 FO7 Total
OAK 126 118 55 18 28 345
TBA 120 111 47 24 35 337
FLO 135 80 73 24 22 334
CHA 123 92 74 20 17 326
LAN 98 118 61 17 16 310
TEX 120 90 78 8 11 307
MIN 99 88 58 32 29 306
MIL 125 82 70 9 12 298
ANA 81 92 71 21 25 290
SEA 95 92 69 16 18 290
ARI 107 85 48 18 18 276
DET 83 95 53 17 23 271
BAL 103 73 52 14 26 268
CIN 88 89 64 10 17 268
TOR 115 74 43 13 22 267
PHI 116 80 45 13 11 265
KCA 97 84 58 13 11 263
SDN 87 84 36 23 21 251
SFN 84 65 66 13 17 245
COL 94 64 43 22 20 243
SLN 97 70 54 14 6 241
NYN 90 60 64 16 11 241
CLE 79 72 63 9 17 240
MON 79 69 55 20 15 238
ATL 84 75 30 33 15 237
BOS 81 70 74 3 5 233
CHN 73 60 66 10 9 218
HOU 106 58 38 9 4 215
PIT 79 53 44 18 11 205
NYA 62 55 77 3 6 203

So the difference between parks with the most foul outs and fewest is on the order of 70 per season. From this list it appears Oakland, Tampa Bay, and Florida have the most foul territory around the infield while Tampa Bay, Minnesota, and Atlanta have the most foul territory in the outfield. It's not surprising that the smallest outfield foul territory looks like Boston, Yankee Stadium, and Houston.

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