It’s telling that Take Me Out to the Ballgame, the anthem of the sport, emphasizes that one can enjoy themselves surrounded by friends and good food, even while their team is failing.
For while it’s one, two, three strikes and you’re out, we should try to keep in mind, though it’s tough, that the end result is not so important as the campaign that led up to it.
Under Billy Beane the A’s have lost all seven of their winner-take-all games. Baseball at its simplest, like flipping a coin, means each team has a 50% chance of winning. (In six of those games, they had a better record than their opponent, so we could probably go higher than 50%.)
Beane has flipped his coin and it has come up tails seven times in a row. The odds of that happening, as surely one of the smart people in the A’s front office could tell you, is 1 in 128.
The irony of that statement, when so much the A’s philosophy is built on simple probability, is absurd. People have killed themselves over less.
Gerrit Cole has seen things you wouldn’t believe,
His hard times are memories lost,
Like his tears in champagne.
There was a great thread last week about which baseball records will never be broken. I took some of the top suggestions and put them into graph form.
Many of the graphs present the top five leaders and active leader. This can give the appearance that many of them are within closer grasp than they sound at first, but keep in mind that there are roughly 20,000 other guys who did not even make the chart in the first place.
It would seem there are many that will indeed stand forever. One I wasn’t aware of prior to reading the thread is the one that takes the cake:
The use of pitcher has clearly changed over the years. A guy today hits 100 pitches and he is done. That obviously influenced the above chart as it does this one:
A reduction in the innings also means a reduction in strikeouts. CC Sabathia has already played for 13 seasons, is 33 years old, and is not even halfway to Nolan Ryan’s strikeout record:
With the increasing bullpen emphasis, pitcher wins also matter much less in today’s game. When guys were throwing a complete game in 95% of their starts though, they got a lot more decisions:
It also meant that they got many more losses, which is why Cy Young’s loss record will probably never be broken either. Ironically, to lose this many games means not that the pitcher has to be bad, but has to be good enough to hang around so long he can build up the loss tally:
Of course if Young’s loss record is broken, he will no doubt hold on to his wins record much longer:
Another change in pitchers has been the increase of the number of runs scored. It is unlikely we will ever see another pitcher with a sub-1 ERA over a whole season. Current pitchers are not necessarily less dominant, though, if we look at ERA+, which compares each ERA to the league average of the year many recent pitchers are in line with the historic seasons of Keefe and Leonard.
Perhaps it’s not a real record category, but Johnny Vander Meer’s feat of throwing two consecutive no-hitters will be tough to beat. Unlike most of the other records, some which take decades to accomplish, this one only takes 18 innings. So I could potentially see someone tying this at some point, but three in a row? Good luck.
On to offense, we find Dimaggio’s famed 56-game hit streak. Unlike the pitchers, there has not been a drastic change in how offensive players are used. So it may take a long time, but this one isn’t insurmountable.
Ichiro arrived in the US at age 27 and stole a career-high 56 bags during his rookie year. Had he started in MLB at age 21 and stole 56 every season until he turned 27, that would bring his current total to one more than Tim Raines for fourth all-time.
Derek Jeter has played at least 145 games in 15 of his 19 seasons. If he continued to hit his career mark of .312 and didn’t miss another game, he would need five more years to break Rose’s record. It’s a safe bet this one will stand for a while.
Another one that would take about five years under optimal conditions to break would be Hank Aaron’s career record for most total bases. A-Rod is doubtful to reach that. Jeter won’t make it either. Albert Pujols, at 34, is about seven great years away.
One you don’t hear every day is Chief Wilson’s record of 36 triples in a season, which he did in 1912. Only Granderson and Lance Johnson have more than 20 triples in the past 20 seasons.
It would be stretch for Pujols to play that long, but not so much for Cal Ripken, Jr. who as you know played every game for 16 seasons. Another cool fact someone mentioned: Japanese player Tomoaki Kanemoto did not miss an at-bat or an inning on defense for ten years.
Finally, we’ve got the Cubs’ drought of 105 years without a World Series. If Epsein can’t pull it off, it may take 200 years.
“People think random distributions should be uniform.” – Keith Law
Despite his name, Eubulides was not a Teletubby. He was, in fact, a philosopher from Ancient Greece. Let’s consider his Bald Man Paradox:
A man with a full head of hair is obviously not bald. Now the removal of a single hair will not turn a non-bald man into a bald one. And yet it is obvious that a continuation of that process must eventually result in baldness.
This is known better as the Paradox of the Heap, which replaces the hair with grains of sand. If the grains of sand are removed, one by one, at which point is the sand no longer a heap of sand?
This same issue applies to players said to be in the midst of hot or cold streaks. At what point is a player’s performance so good that he is hot? If he had one fewer hit in his last 15 at-bats, would he still be hot? What about two fewer?
“The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is.” – Marcel Proust
I cry one time each year, usually in March.
But we’ll come back to that later. First, let’s think about stupid things:
Doug Stanhope: “If you think football is stupid, you’re right. But it’s my stupid. You have your stupid, you play World of Warcraft, or you do renaissance festivals, you grow organic apples and sell them at the farmer’s market… whatever you do, football is my stupid.”
Everybody has seen something that millions of other people love and failed to grasp why it is so interesting. Despite having stupid hobbies of our own, we bring up our confusion with those who work on cars or read comic books or collect stamps. I make fun of my mom for watching Law & Order every week even though every episode is the same (this is where she yells, “No they aren’t!”). Yet when we are made fun of, we do not understand how people can fail to grasp the intricacies of our hobby.
The people who take the time to really get into a TV show or sport will always appreciate it more than those who do not. But as people on the outside, we can usually accept that different people appreciate different things (even if it upsets us like it does Sean). What is less appreciated is that even among the millions fans of a particular topic, no two of them are actually thinking about the same thing either.
I can watch the same baseball game as you and we would both be watching different things. We would describe the gameplay differently, and so would 600 other people in the park. We know this and yet, we never think about it. But I think we can gain a much greater appreciation of the sport and the way we view it by exploring this a bit further.
Inside a Baseball Mind
Some people spend hours studying prospects as they progress through the minors, some breakdown trends in player contracts, boatloads analyze statistics for their fantasy teams. And none of those things have to do with actually sitting down at the ballpark and actually watching a game—be it MLB, an independent professional league, college, a minor league game, a summer college league, tee-ball, or whatever pro league they have in Japan. There are baseball fans that focus most of their time on each of those leagues. Many concentrate on a single team within one of those leagues (although, unless you are a parent you should probably avoid focusing on one tee-ball team).
Then when the game actually starts, there are another thousand things to look at. How the first baseman is holding the runner on first, if the third baseman properly charged that bunt, or if the shortstop covered second base during that stolen base attempt in time. There are 2430 MLB games each year and you could write an entire book about any one of them. Daniel Okrent actually did.
I could list off aspects of the game people study for an hour, but the point is that there is too much to process. Baseball is a buffet, not a dish. We are forced to pick and choose what to pay attention to, often unknowingly so. This is how we have always watched games, after all, and we forget that there are other ways.
Keeping Score, or How I Learned to Love 3% of the Game
Scorekeeping can be enjoyable if you do it the way most people do: write down what happened after the play is over. When you really get into it though, there is a lot more to think about. I have been really into scorekeeping for over a decade. The interest led me to become the scorekeeper for a college summer league team. And I have scored a few hundred games over the last five summers.
In the press box, this is my mind:
New inning. OK, same pitcher. No defensive changes.
Michaels is up. Check scorecard, right batting order.
Ball or strike? Ball. Write down ball.
Ball or strike? Swinging strike. Write down swinging strike.
Ball or strike? Hit. Line drive single. Write down line drive single to right field.
Next batter, should be Jones. Jones it is, no pinch hitter.
Runner on first, so I’m looking at him—not the batter—to see if he tries to steal. I have already forgotten that it’s Michaels and that he singled. That’s already written on my scorecard which makes it irrelevant to me. Watching the pitcher’s delivery out of the corner of my eye, he goes home and the runner isn’t stealing so now I’m looking to see if the ball is bouncing in front of the catcher—that would be an automatic wild pitch—or if we’ve got a passed ball. The ball doesn’t bounce, but it is a called strike. Write down called strike.
After you watch a few hundred games like that it reprograms your mind. Note that I do not care about pitch selection, velocity, or a pitcher’s windup. I don’t care who the second baseman is, or how many errors he has this year. To me he is #4. When it comes to hits and errors or even the score, I don’t care about whether guys are on the home team or not.
I care about: was that a ball or strike? Was the runner moving on the pitch? Because if the ball gets past the catcher and the runner was going it is a stolen base instead of a wild pitch; and when the ball is in the backstop you can’t rewind the tape to see if the runner was going. Anticipation is vital. I write everything down, and as soon as it is on my scorecard, I dismiss it from my thoughts.
I left out the part where I operate the scoreboard too.
I usually stand the whole game (mainly due to poor park architecture) with my mental checklist on a constant loop. There are no replays to fall back on. Anticipating every pitch for two-and-a-half hours without taking your eyes off the game can be draining, especially when there is a group of cute girls sitting over on the third base side. It is an old saying in Hollywood that, “Pain is temporary, but film lasts forever.” Baseball games are temporary too, but box scores last forever. I try not to screw them up.
Zen and the Art of Bullpen Management
A few years ago, some people got worked up over a divide between traditional scouts and newer stat guys. Both the book and film adaptation of Moneyball reportedly portrayed the rivalry to a greater degree than it existed, but without question, some people see more value in numbers than others. (The divide is super-exaggerated in the 2012 film Trouble With the Curve, which I recommend to anyone who enjoys watching horrible movies.) This is not a new debate though. It is an old one wearing new shoes. They are cleats, probably.
Abridged Wikipedia summary on the 1974 book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: The book details two types of personalities. Romantic viewpoints, such as Zen, focused on being “in the moment,” rather than pursuing rational analysis. And those who seek to know the details, understand the inner workings, and master the mechanics classic viewpoints with application of rational analysis, vis-a-vis motorcycle maintenance.
The argument goes much further back than the 70s, but this book is good place to start. The main character of Zen has a deep knowledge of how his motorcycle works. It is not really one object that you know how to fix when it breaks down. It is a large collection of small parts. Knowing how to fix the motorcycle comes down to identifying which part has gone bad and knowing how to correct the problem. In contrast, the narrator has a buddy who enjoys riding, but does not know much about what to do when his bike starts acting up. This leads to frustration and paying a mechanic a bunch of money to fix it. Both enjoy riding motorcycles, but they appreciate it from very different angles.
A baseball team is the same way. The narrator in Zen had charts about his motorcycle, and a general manager looking to improve his team could break his roster, specifically his pitching staff down, like this:
All GM’s and most fans do this, to some extent, even if it is not written down. A chart like that can potentially be expanded until it incorporates the entirety of existence, but we’ll stick with the pitchers for now.
Whether you are into advanced stats or not, everybody has compared one pitcher’s numbers to another’s at some point. It is not sufficient to know that a pitcher needs to give fewer runs because there are so many factors that affect whether a run scores or not. The increased number of stats over the past couple decades has allowed people to start looking at baseball on an even deeper classical level.
Maybe a pitcher needs to improve play with runners on base (we know he struggles in this area because we now have stats that weren’t always available). He could work on the speed of his delivery or his pickoff move. We can identify release points of pitches. How long is it taking a pitcher to tire during a game and drop his arm angle? Or perhaps a pitcher should be working to get a higher percentage of groundballs to decrease the number of extra-base hits his is allowing.
On the other hand, you have baseball romantics. Most are not as extreme as Harold Reynolds and announcer Hawk Harrelson who act as if saying any number aloud while in the same room with them will cause them to break out in a rash. Many authors though, do an excellent job of bringing out this aspect of the game, whether their stories are true or not. Guys like A. Bartlett Giamatti, Lawrence Ritter, Jim Bouton, and many others can bring out the joy of going to the ballpark that cannot be quantified.
Franklin Pierce Adams’s poem “Baseball’s Sad Lexicon”:
These are the saddest of possible words:
“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”
Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,
Tinker and Evers and Chance.
Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,
Making a Giant hit into a double –
Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:
“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”
The romantics often accuse the stat guys of taking all of the emotion out of the game, of being cold and hard. After I finish writing this I am going to go back to my spreadsheet:
Many people would cringe at that sight, but for me there is baseball in those numbers. What the romantics fail to realize is that that spreadsheet is not baseball, but a way to enhance baseball. After all of the stats, after all of the games each summer where I miss the intricate interwoven stories so I can concentrate on my scorecard, I make an annual pilgrimage to the heart of romantic baseball-land. Each spring I watch Field of Dreams and at the end as Ray plays catch with his dad and the camera ascends into the night sky, I tear up. Every fucking time.
Baseball and Goo
Thus we come to the crux of it: Realizing that there are many lenses through which to watch a ballgame, what should we be paying attention to in order to get the most enjoyment out of this baseball? What is it that keeps us coming back?
With my spreadsheets and annual screenings of Field of Dreams, I have reached the same conclusion that the narrator in Zen ultimately did, and that many scouts and sabermatricians will see or have already found.
I have typed numbers into spreadsheets until the wee hours of the morning many times (my social life is not very big). But it is not about the numbers, the numbers are a tool to appreciate what happens in that Iowan cornfield. Without numbers, we would not know how good of a player Shoeless Joe was and how much of a tragedy it was to see him and his teammates banned. Without numbers we would not have the Oakland A’s making the playoffs year after year despite their miniscule payroll. Without numbers we would not have people talking about the approaching era of Game Theory in baseball. None of these things are trying to replace the romantics, they are increasing the ways to appreciate the sport.
You do not have to be stathead or a romantic. In baseball, as in life, it is not one or the other. There is a continuum between the two, with unlimited stops along the way. Neither exists without the other. Neither can exist without the other. Perhaps Alan Watts, a philosopher who was discussing the classical vs romantic issue long before it entered the baseball diamond, explains it best:
We can still have our favorite lens though which to view the game, perhaps it is inevitable. There are things about baseball I will never know. Either I have little interest in them or that I have no need to know. I cannot not name, for example, the amount of money any baseball player makes. But taking the time to look at other points on the spectrum, to experience the game through the eyes of as many others as possible and recognize that looking at these alternate ways of viewing the game, is the only way to help us truly appreciate the things that we do care about.
It is true in baseball, as it is in life:
“You better catch that fly ball out in left field or you’re marked forever.”
– George Plimpton
“If it was easy everyone would do it.”
– traditional saying
“Those fools who watch a baseball game and declare it boring are not those who fail to understand it, or even fail to appreciate it: they fail to imagine it.”
– Patrick Dubuque
It is easy to kick a soccer ball. Or catch a baseball.
I had a classmate who tried to convince me lacrosse was the best sport. “I mean, what do you do in baseball? Maybe catch a few ground balls, but you don’t run that much. It’s easy. It’s boring.”
He was right. It is easy to catch a baseball. Or kick a soccer ball. Or whatever the verb is to describe curling. You and I could find a back yard and play catch right now.
It is difficult make an argument for “best” sport. It is too subjective. What is perceived as boring though, we can change. You see, what Louis Lacrosse failed to realize is the simplicity of these sports makes them entertaining, and makes them difficult.
The New York Giants led the final game of the 1912 World Series 2-1 in the 10th inning. The leadoff batter hit a lazy fly ball to the outfield. Fred Snodgrass, New York’s center fielder, drifted in and caught the ball. It is easy to catch a baseball.
Then he dropped it.
The runner got on. The Red Sox scored two runs. Snodgrass and the Giants lost the game and the World Series.
One play does not lose a game. We all know this. But as Snodgrass said of the play, “The facts don’t seem to matter.”
Fred Snodgrass retired four years later. He got married and had two daughters. He moved to California and became a banker. The citizens of Oxnard elected him to the city council and he went on to become the city’s mayor.
Snodgrass lived in California for almost 60 years before he died in April 1974. The next day an obituary appeared in The New York Times entitled: Fred Snodgrass, 86, Dead; Ball Player Muffed 1912 Fly.
It is easy to catch a baseball.
Many Americans, Louis Lacrosse likely included, will tell you that soccer is boring. The trap that most fall into—the one that I fell into until I reexamined the sport a few months ago—is that a soccer field (sorry, soccer pitch) is set up like a hockey rink. Hockey is familiar to us. We expect the games to go a certain way. Quick play, non-stop, back-and-forth action, relentless defense, power plays, players intercepting the puck en route to breakaways.
It is not the set-up of the court that is important though, but rather the pace of the game. This is why soccer is no so much related to hockey as it is to baseball.
If you watch a soccer game (sorry, soccer match), perhaps one in the World Cup this year, there will be a lot of time spent simply passing the ball back-and-forth. Teams will retreat to maintain possession of the ball. Guys will take an extra second to get up and walk it off—even while the game continues around them.
This is not slow, boring gameplay; it is expected. Like baseball, soccer is a pastoral game. A pastime leftover from a slower world. Soccer’s clock marches ever onward—but timing is not precise and rigid as in American sports. There is little, if any, emphasis on racing the clock.
There are about 18 minutes of action in a three-hour baseball game. Soccer, if timed, I suspect is close to that. The action on the field may stop, but the anticipation of what could happen next never does. Thus the entertainment value for those who have taken the time to study the game skyrockets. So many things could happen next.
Soccer’s pace is the opening hill of a roller coaster. It may seem nonchalant, but at some point it will reach the tipping point. And when they go for it when they start to sprint, the pass, its reception, and the shot on goal all have to fall into place like dominos, one after the next, if they want to see the ball in the net. Over an hour-and-a-half they may only have a handful of chances to get a shot off.
So when there are millions of eyes on you and the ball is on your foot, you better not miss. If you do, they will still be reading about you a hundred years from now. Because it is easy to kick a soccer ball.
I remember one of the many complaints of the Pirates in the early 2000s was that they had a few guys who could get on base, but nobody to knock them in. Since you have to score runs to win this was, of course, a problem. And so when the post-game show flashed the box score, including that the Pirates had left ten more guys on tonight, everyone shook their heads.
The inclusion of that number seemed to indicate that stranded runners are an important aspect of the game. If nobody was left on base that meant they were scoring. But is this actually true?
I don’t have numbers from the MLB, but I do have them from the Prospect League, which is a college summer wooden bat league that stretches from Pennsylvania to Illinois. Players typically come from Division I and II schools. In 2013, teams met for 326 games, which gives us 652 team games to look at how many runners were left on base and how many runs they scored. I separated each game by the number of runs scored (teams were shut out in 60 games, they scored one run in 70 games, etc.) and found the average number of runners left on for each run total.
Conventional wisdom would tell us that we should have an inverse relationship. The more guys who come around to score means there are less left on base, which is why we are happier when we see two guys were left on than ten.
What the numbers show is the opposite. Teams who scored three or less runs left an average of 7.05 guys on, while a team that scored four or more runs were leaving over 8.49 guys on base per game. Teams who were shutout left the lowest average on at just 6.21 runners. Why there is a sudden dip at eight runs per game is anybody’s guess.
Our conventional thinking is almost as if each team has a finite number of base runners each night, and the job is then to knock them home. This is obviously not the case and overall the numbers seem to indicate that hitting throughout a lineup during a game will develop into a snowball effect. On the other side, if a pitching staff is on, not only are they going to allow fewer runs, they are going to allow fewer runners period. The specific number of runs you get comes down to the timing of the hits.
I am not saying that it should be a goal to leave more guys on base. It is likely the other way around; the teams who score runs are putting more guys on base and so they are stranded when the timely hit is not there, but at least they gave themselves a chance to hit with runners on base.
If we look at the totals for MLB teams in 2013, we find only a .13 correlation coefficient between the number of guys a team left on base and the average number of runs they scored during the game. Obviously there is not much of a relationship here. Our line does have a positive slope though, again showing that it was not the inverse relationship that we had thought.
In short, there is no sense in worrying about leaving too many guys on base. If anything, more is actually better.
In the first inning of the first game between the Butler BlueSox and Slippery Rock Sliders there was a bench clearing brawl. No punches were thrown, no lips bloodied, no oxen charged the field, but from amid the chaos emerged the Route 8 Rivalry.
It was announced Wednesday that the Rivalry had reached its end. The Sliders are moving to Springfield, Ohio and becoming the Champion City Kings.
Pennsylvania’s Route 8 connects West Virginia to Erie, but a 17-mile stretch links Main Street in Butler to Main Street in Slippery Rock along the way. The trip takes a half-hour if there is traffic, which is rare, and was an oft-made journey by BlueSox and Sliders fans the past five summers.
When the Prospect League was formed in 2009 the BlueSox and Sliders were the League’s easternmost teams as well as the League’s closest teams. Of the pair only Slippery Rock has advanced to the post-sesaon, which they did by winning the season’s second half title in 2011. On the other hand, the BlueSox were able to best the Sliders in the standings four out of five years. Head-to-head Butler prevailed 56% of the time–it’s a majority, but not by much.
In that first game, things settled down after the players returned to their benches and Slippery Rock was able to squeak out a 2-1 win. The following night at Jack Critchfield Park, Butler was able to hand the Sliders their first home loss by squeaking out a single run off a sidearm reliever named Justin Thomas. Three years later Thomas became the BlueSox pitching coach and helped a staff that finished second in the League in strikeouts.
The following season the two teams played 20 innings in a single day when the nightcap of their double header went into extra innings. Though double header games are seven inning contests, neither team allowed a run for seven frames as the game stood at 4-4. Finally in the top of the 13th, AJ Miller knocked a ball over Pullman Park’s fence and Slippery Rock held on for the win and split the twin bill.
The Rivalry unquestionably peaked in its closing innings over the final two days of the 2013 season. Not that BlueSox fans will want to hear the tale retold, but Butler entered the season’s final two days with a magic number of one over Chillicothe. The BlueSox traveled to Slippery Rock on Saturday night, and the game entered the seventh inning with the Sliders leading 3-1. Butler scored four runs in the seventh to take the lead, only to watch the game slip away with an agonizing combination of wild pitches and bloop singles.
Chillicothe took care of business in their final two games, including a 1-0 win in Lorain in ten innings on Sunday afternoon. But despite having been eliminated from the race for over a week and a half, the Sliders once again refused to make anything easy for their rivals. Butler put up nine hits on Sunday evening, but the Sliders forced them to strand runners in seven different frames to claim the shutout, the victory, and in the last game the team would ever play, eliminate their Route 8 Rivals from the playoffs.
The media has begun to invent new rivalries in an attempt to increase interest in lame games, but that was never the case in the Route 8 Rivalry. I had the pleasure to watch over 50 games between the BlueSox and Sliders, and while the players changed from year-to-year, while both teams struggled at times, the special rivalry that these two teams never fell off its pace. Come spring the BlueSox look forward to playing (and beating) the Kings, but we will miss our good friends and rivals up in Slippery Rock.
This post was written for ButlerBlueSox.net and published in October 2013.
If somebody started an Anything-Goes Olympic Games with no drug testing whatsoever it would be intriguing, but ultimately unfulfilling next to the real Olympics. Such an event would produce feats of strength and speed that never before seen. And that would be both its strength and weakness.
As much as any other sport baseball passed down from generation to generation. The annual spring ritual of father and son playing catch is timeless. Eventually the kid gets into Little League and plays a decade or so of organized ball before joining the rest of us schmucks on the bleachers to watch people far better than us play a game that kids play.
There is a level of anticipation that we feel watching a guy step up to the plate with two on and two out, or while Peyton Manning is conducting his offensive orchestra before a key snap. But there is a separate level of excitement we gain from sports in their longevity. I can say 713 or .406 to any baseball fan and they will know right away that is the number of home runs Babe Ruth hit and the average Ted Williams had in the last season anyone hit over .400.
We like these numbers because it allows us to compare the guys who are playing now with the guys our grandfathers watched when they were kids. (Or at least provides that illusion, the rules haven’t changed much, but professional sports are clearly different than they were 60 years ago.)
It’s this latter level of enjoyment that makes a lasting impression on fans. We want to watch the same game we were watching 20 years ago. Sure, we would watch in amazement as juiced-up sprinters ran 100 meters in 8 seconds, but our inability to compare their performance to yesteryears’ athletes—an Olympian is not just competing against himself, he’s competing against everyone who has ever participated in that event since Greece—would ultimately make such a spectacle less fulfilling.
@pmreddick 