Fangraphs.com blogger David Appelman did a terrific post on the odds of catching a foul ball at a major league baseball game. I’d like to expand on it here.

Appelman somehow came across the fact that there were 120,946 foul balls and home runs hit during 2005 and 74,915,268 fans in attendance during the year. For the sake of argument (and more work), I will assume the figures to be true.

Using strictly these figures, Appelman concluded that 1 in 619 fans go home with a ball. But, he then recalculated on the assumption that only half of those balls are hit into the stands (not all foul balls leave the park). So his new figure was 1 in 1,189.

I’m not sure that 50 percent is quite right, though. I’d say it’s more like 70 percent of fouls hit the seats (not to mention not all homers hit the seats either…). If that’s the case, the odds of leaving with a foul ball are 1 in 884.

There is another way to get a souvenir at a game: batting practice. Not as cool as a live game foul ball, but still nice to go home with. Let’s make up some numbers for this:

I’ll say 10 players from each team take batting practice and let’s say each player hits an average of 1.5 home runs during practice (I’m trying to accommodate Pujols’ 7 and Eckstein’s 1, on a good day). That’s 15 more souvenirs per team, per game. That’s 72,900 additional souvenirs. Add that to all the 2005 fouls/HRs and there are 193,846 souvenirs. I’m also going to throw, say, 50 thrown bats into the mix (why not?). The new figure comes out to 1 in 386 fans. Remember, that’s only if you show up early enough for batting practice and stand in the outfield.

That number seems about right to me, considering it’s far easier to nab a ball during batting practice.

The last exercise I would like to do is a local angle. I’ll divide the total fouls/HRs by thirty to isolate a single team, roughly. Then I’ll divide that figure by two, to isolate home games. That figure is 2,016 fouls/HRs in a season for any team.

The White Sox total attendance in 2005 was 2,342,834 (almost league average). If you went to every White Sox game that year you had a 1 in 1,162 chance of getting a souvenir. In 1999, the White Sox had a total attendance of almost a million less at 1,349,151. The odds that year would have been in 1 in 669. Not bad.

Cubs attendance has been consistently 3.1 million over the last three years. The chance of catching a foul at Wrigley is 1 in 1,537. Pretty bad.

That is, of course, if you go to every game. I’ll take this one step further for those of you that are still reading. Using average attendance, I can calculate per game odds.

The White Sox averaged 28,923 fans per game in 2005. If there were 2,016 fouls/HRs hit in 81 games, then there were, on average, 25 hit per game. Then you have a roughly 1 in 1,156 chance of nabbing one at the Cell.

The Cubs averaged 38,753 per game in 2005, meaning you had a 1 in 1,550 chance of leaving with a souvenir.

Math is not my strong suit, so if and when you find a mathematical error here, you can feel free to laugh. Assuming these figures are all correct doesn’t mean they are 100 percent accurate from a practical sense. But it’s interesting to know.

As Appelman said, “Odds are, the only way I’ll be getting a baseball at a game, is at the souvenir stand.”

Just, out.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 11th, 2007 at 11:49 pm and is filed under White Sox, Cubs, MLB General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.