Edgy MD wrote: Because the defense didn't complete the play, and therefore they've performed worse. Yes, I think reaching on errors and passed balls/wild pitch-strikeouts should count in your on-base percentage, but it don't. well, it's still not indicative of batter skill. It's luck of the pitch, the catcher, the outs, the runners. Adding it to OBP would just be confusing, and most modern evaluation stats would strip it back out anyway. https://sabr.org/research/dropped-third-strike-life-and-times-rule It looks like it really should just go away anyway. One of those odd remaining bits from the 19th century. Basically, you were supposed to swing and put the ball in play, that WAS the game. if you swung and missed three times the third swing was automatically 'ball in play'. This evolved when they moved to a 'fly game' where if you caught that ball it was an out, and that was what was expected. You were also able to catch balls after only one bounce for an out. So it remained that you could purposely drop the third strike to trigger the force at all bases and get a double or triple play out of it, and when fielding equipment evolved to make this way more likely, they changed the rule to eliminate it with a runner on first < 2 outs but that's basically the end of it. The rule is vestigial and should probably go the way of the intentional walk.