Okay, so I was watching a baseball game the other day, and I kept seeing this “LOB” stat pop up on the screen. I’m kind of new to really following baseball, so I had no clue what it meant. I was like “Lob? What’s a lob in baseball?” I decided to look it up and figure it out.
So first, I grabbed my phone and did a quick search. Turns out, LOB stands for “Left On Base.” I felt like it should have been obvious, but well, it wasn’t to me. I read a little bit about it, and basically, it’s about how many runners are left on the bases when a batter makes an out, or how many are left at the end of an inning.
Then I started thinking, “Well, is this a stat for the individual batter, or the whole team?” Turns out, it can be both! I saw that in a box score, each player has an LOB number next to their name. That’s how many runners were on base when they came up to bat and were STILL there when their turn at bat ended. Pretty straightforward, right? It means the batter failed to get those runners to the plate.
- I also dug a little deeper and found something called LOB%.
- This is a percentage that shows how often a pitcher leaves runners on base.
- Apparently, it can be a way to tell if a pitcher is doing better or worse than they should be.
There was also this one article that mentioned something about an unassisted triple play. It said this is when one player makes all three outs on their own in a single play. That sounds crazy! And it said it’s only happened 15 times in Major League Baseball history. It’s like, even rarer than a perfect game. I got sidetracked for a bit just reading about that, haha.
Anyway, back to LOB. I finally understood that it’s a big deal because it shows how many scoring opportunities a team might be wasting. You want that number to be low, obviously. I mean, you gotta get those runners home to score some runs!
Learned a lot today
So yeah, that’s my little journey into understanding what LOB means in baseball. It wasn’t as simple as I thought it would be, but now I feel like I’ve got a better grasp on it. It’s funny how you can watch a game for years and still learn new things about it. I’ll definitely be paying more attention to that LOB stat from now on!
