Stats help for a boardgame design?

[flogger]

I hope I've come to the right place. I'm trying to design a statistically driven baseball game, and while I enjoy baseball and am fairly knowledgeable, I am certainly no guru.

I have a few questions regarding certain stats and certain situations that I can't find the answers to elsewhere.

The first is on the subject of Air Outs (AO) and SF. Are SF included in the overall AO numbers or recorded separately? In other words, if stats said a team had 1000 AO on a season and 100 SF, is that 1100 total outs or 1000 OF WHICH 100 were SF?

Next, I assume that IFF outs are included in the AO figure. Where can I get raw data on number of IFF outs?

Thanks in advance for any help. If I can get these answered, I'll probably have a few more for you....

Cheers,

[astrosfanatic]

Welcome to Baseball Nation! I don't know the answer to your question, but there are plenty of knowledgeable guys here who might know...

[WilsonC]

On the first question, SF are included in the denominator for OBP, so I'm pretty sure they'd be classified as outs. I'm not 100% certain they'd be classified as AO, though, and it could vary (see #2).

The second one is a bit tricky. The reason for that is that there's a degree of subjectivity involved in FB, LD, GB classifications, and there's no official scorer classifying them the way they do with something like errors. That means different sites use different sources, and you'll see some discrepancies. Fangraphs, I believe, includes IFFB as a subset of FB, so they're included as a percentage of the total FB. Baseball Reference lists IF/FB as a percentage of the total as well, but includes LD as well as FB. Baseball Prospectus, on the other hand, includes pop-ups as a separate type of batted ball.

Ultimately, there's nothing official for handling AO and GB. There's data at each of the three sites listed, but the data isn't consistent, so it might take some searching to figure out which one best fits with your design.