Hey look, everyone, it's my first fanpost.

Mostly I just wanted to get this out there because it's been in my head for a while and I wanted someone else to look at it. Heck, it's probably been done better elsewhere already, but here goes.

I wanted to see if there's a way to modify the P/PA stat so that it doesn't penalize batters for reaching base on an early count. This became a conceptual problem for me, mostly because I wasn't sure how to go about that, but I settled on a rather crude formula of subtracting PAs that end in reaching base from the denominator. So, hits, walks, HBPs, and I went ahead and included ROE because it just seemed fair. What you're left with is, in theory, the average number of pitches it takes before you don't reach.

I wasn't sure how to account for, say, reaching on fielder's choice, sac bunts, and probably some other considerations that I should have looked at but didn't. However, I applied it to all batters on the 2012 Giants who had at least 100 PAs, and at the very least it passed my Aha I Thought So test.

So here's how the 2012 Giants batters looked, in order from highest to lowest Pitches per No-Reach (contact me directly if you need anything inelegantly named, I am very good at it).

First things first: Did you know that both Pill and Burriss got more than 100 PAs this year. They did.

But it looks about how I'd answer off the top of my head if someone asked me to rank the team's toughest outs. Up there at the top is Wow Buster Posey, Belt, and Scutaro, Blanco also looks to make good use of his time at the plate, I made a sad face at Schierholtz, Pablo doesn't seem to hurt from his approach as much as it appears from time to time, Hunter Pence was a disaster, and Pill and Burriss had over 100 PAs each.

Also note that if you order it simply by P/PA, it doesn't look drastically different, except that Scutaro and Melky drop way down, which I guess says something about the value of their approach. I included OPS+ here as an afterthought to see if there's any interesting correlation. What I found is that I don't know what makes a correlation interesting in this context. In fact I'm not entirely sure how meaningful any of this is. It's just a problem that bugged me. In the words of Cicero, "Aurantium sanguino aurantium sanguino."