In baseball statistics

Baseball statistics

Statistics play an important role in summarizing baseball performance and evaluating players in the sport.Since the flow of a baseball game has natural breaks to it, and normally players act individually rather than performing in clusters, the sport lends itself to easy record-keeping and statistics...

, the Basic Pitch Count Estimator is a statistic used to try to estimate the number of pitches thrown by a pitcher where there is no pitch count

Pitch count

In baseball statistics, pitch count is the number of pitches thrown by a pitcher in a game.Pitch counts are especially a concern for young pitchers, pitchers recovering from injury, or pitchers who have a history of injuries. The pitcher wants to keep the pitch count low because of his stamina...

 data available. The formula was first derived by Tom M. Tango

Tom Tango

Tom Tango and "TangoTiger" are aliases used online by a well-respected expert in baseball sabermetrics and ice hockey statistical analysis. He runs the Tango on Baseball sabermetrics website and is also a contributor to ESPN's baseball blog TMI .In 2006, Tango's book The Book: Playing the...

. The formula is http://www.tangotiger.net/pitchCounts.html, where PA is equivalent to the number of plate appearances against the pitcher, SO is equal to strikeouts thrown (Ks), and BB is the number of walks thrown (BB, or bases on balls).