To qualify for either leaderboard, a player must have had either 502 plate appearances (enough to qualify for the batting title) or 150 infield balls in play (IFBIP). Links in the tables go to Baseball-Reference.

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+ IFOP Leaders for 2010 Season

2010 was a good year for IFOP. Given 600 PA, the league average player would have posted an IFOP of nearly +9 (+8.88 to be precise). The median among qualified players was +7. These players were the top of the heap.

Ichiro, as you might expect, is a regular on these IFOP leaderboards. His +69 total blew away the rest of the league in 2010. There aren’t really any surprises, unless you don’t know much about young guys like Jose Tabata and Julio Borbon.

Just for fun, here’s the bottom six in IFOP for 2010:

Yes, you read that right. I have finally created a stat in which Albert Pujols ranks poorly! Seriously, though, you can see that having a low IFOP is not much detriment to a hitter. Butler and Pujols were excellent in 2010, and Lee, Jones, and Napoli were decent. Only Jose Lopez was anywhere near as bad in other areas as he was in IFOP. He basically stunk at everything in 2010.

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IFO/C Leaders for 2010 Season

IFO/C is the rate version of IFOP. It measures how many infield outs a player makes for every 100 balls he hits on the infield. The MLB average in 2010 was 95.7, meaning about 96 outs were made for every 100 balls hit on the infield. Lower is better, so an excellent score would be around 90 or below, and a very bad score would be above 100.

The three additions to this list who were not on the IFOP leaderboard are Stubbs, Gomes, and Peña. Amazingly, Peña–who is not known for his speed–hit into only 3 infield double plays, and only two on the ground. Yet he still had 17 infield hits and 7 reaches on errors.

The biggest name to fall off this list is probably Juan Pierre, who ranked 5th in IFOP but hit so many balls on the infield that his IFO/C was only 89.6 (still excellent, just not in the top 20).

This is how good Ichiro is at being Ichiro: he only makes 80 outs for every 100 balls he hits on the infield. That’s about the same as hitting .200 on balls hit to infielders, which is just ridiculous, seeing as how the average is more like .050.