New Season. New Features.

Here’s what we’ve added for baseball and softball teams for the 2014 season.

New Softball Field View

New Scorebook View

We’ve redesigned the scorebook on the website to look better and more traditional. It’s also more printer-friendly, so you can easily send it in to your league president. Learn more.

Lineup Card PDFs

We’ve made it easier than ever to prepare for your game with Lineup Card PDFs that can be emailed or printed right from the app. Learn more.

Box Score PDFs

As soon as the game is over, we instantly generate a box score PDF in the app that you can send to fans or local media. Learn more.

Export Season Stats

Export season stats for every player to a sortable CSV file. You can find the export link at the bottom of your season stats page. Learn more.

New Substitution Flow

We’ve made it easier for scorekeepers to manage substitutions and lineup changes during the game. We suggest you review these changes before your first game. Learn more.

Practice Schedules

Schedule practices from the website or the app. Add arrival time, notes, or any other details that players and family need to know. Learn more.

Team Announcements

Practice canceled? Team Admins can send announcements from the app or website. Fans can receive announcements via email or SMS message for free. Learn more.

Choose Your Audience

Some things can be shared with everyone who follows your team. But sometimes only players and family need information. Learn more.

Create your Team today

Questions? Comments? Email us.

The Value of Patience

How Many Runs is a Walk Worth?

By Spencer Wright

When the book Moneyball was published in 2003, it shared the ground-breaking insight that batting average was not nearly as important to scoring runs as on-base percentage (OBP). The reason? As much as hits are valuable, the ability to get on base in other ways, and therefore not get out, is extremely useful as well. And the very best players figure out ways to do both. As the lessons of Moneyball continue to seep into popular culture (the movie was nominated for an Oscar) and amateur sports (GameChanger automatically calculates and displays these stats), it is worth reviewing both why walking and plate patience are skills to teach young players.

The benefits of the walk, although seemingly obvious, are always worth thinking about. First, drawing a walk means you did not get out. That is a victory in a sport where even the best players generally make outs over half the time. Second, getting walked puts a runner on base that can later be driven in. Third, getting walked means that you have taken at least four pitches, tiring the pitcher out and bringing him or her closer to their pitch limit. Finally, working your way into a hitter’s count can give you better pitches to hit.

That analysis is great, but advances in baseball statistics allow us to actually quantify how many “runs” a walk (or any play) is worth.  This Chart shows us exactly how many “runs” different plays in baseball are worth, using real data from the Major Leagues from 1974-1990. By recording every single play that happened and the resulting runs, they could figure out how much each play was worth on average, independent of context. Real situations, real outcomes. Think data from the Major Leagues is not applicable to your team? Think again. Because the numbers can be adjusted based on how many runs, on average, a team scores in your league, the Runs per Game column allows you to look at the numbers in a way that already adjusts for the scoring in your league.

What this data says is that a walk is always worth about two-thirds as much as a single (the value of a single is significantly enhanced because of the ability to score runners from 2nd and 3rd). Even though a walk is worth less than a single, it is still an extremely valuable play for a hitter: a single walk in a game is worth between .25 and .35 runs per game. A three walk game is just as good as a two hit game. And that does not even include the benefits of increasing pitch counts or the advantage of batter’s counts. Moreover, the value of a walk versus a single actually does not change much, even in leagues that are higher or lower scoring, so you can apply these numbers to your team as well. 

These numbers are not perfect, but the general values are applicable across all levels. And even more importantly, they concretely illustrate the value of a patient approach at the plate.