The All-Star game is going to the bottom of the 13th in a 3-3 tie. Both teams are 3-27 with runners in scoring position. There have been something like 19 pitchers used. Gadzooks.
Addendum: Uggla just committed his third error, a new player record for the All-Star game.
Addendum: Michael Young gets a sacrifice fly, scoring Morneau from third in the bottom of the 15th. Sweet Zombie Jesus, what a marathon that one was. AL wins 4-3.
Didn’t catch the Friday win for the Athletics over their Bay Area rivals, but found out that the sprinklers came on during the ninth with two outs and Houston Street on the mound. It didn’t help the Giants.
YouTube – Oakland A’s Get Wet and Wild
Slugger Frank Thomas got let go from Toronto, and got resigned to come back to Oakland and smack some balls around for us. I couldn’t be more tickled. It’s the first inning in the A’s versus the Angel, and big Frank comes up and smacks a ball to right that Vladimir Guerrero misplayed, and Frank motored to a triple.
Damn, I’m glad he’s back on our side.
The Sabernomics blog has some suggested rule changes that might serve to speed up the game. I haven’t blogged about a baseball related topic in a while, so I thought I’d toss my two cents worth in.
First of all, I’m not certain there is a pervasive problem with baseball games taking too long. How long is too long for a baseball game, and how did you decide? To me, baseball games have a certain pace. Yes, some of them are rather plodding affairs, but perhaps no more so than other sports such as football or basketball. Those games have a system of timing and timeouts that are supposed to keep the game moving, but the reality is that as the game should become more exciting, timeouts slow the pace down. Defenses are reset. Challenges to plays on the field are issued. Intentional fouls halt play and result in an official handing the ball to one side or the other.
Even if you accept that perhaps a 3 hour 9 inning game is too long, it’s not clear that any rule changes need to happen to change it. There are some pitchers that are just insanely slow and dawdling, and others work a a reasonable clip. Mark Mulder pitched a lot of games in 2:20, and a few memorable ones below two hours. It’s possible to manage without any rule changes. Section 8.04 says that the pitcher has to deliver the ball within 12 seconds of receiving it from the catcher, with the penalty being a called ball. Obvious delays are supposed to be punished by the umpires. Some guys really dawdle out there on the mound.
The linked post suggests a few other good ideas. I think eliminating the 8 warm up tosses might be a good idea, but in any case, the rules say that the 8 pitches should be completed in less than a minute, and that the league is free to limit the number of warm up tosses further within the rules. I don’t think it’s a bad idea to limit these, but I think the deeper problem lies in the number of pitchers substitutions that we see late in games. You don’t see starters pitching complete games anymore: you have middle relievers, and setup guys, and closers. The idea is that by doing things this way, you limit injuries caused by overpitching, but I think that as a result, we see people throwing harder earlier in games (often with mediocre control), and so I’m skeptical that this practice has reduced actual injuries among pitchers.
I think that it’s important to allow batters to step out of the box. Baseball is really two games, the game that’s played between the pitcher and the batter, and between the ball and fielders. The first phase requires a careful balance between the pitcher and the batter. Requiring a batter to take a pitch that he’s unprepared for shifts that balance (as, it must be said) is allowing pitchers to pitch very slowly. I’d be loathe to change this balance too much.
Eliminating unlimited time outs probably wouldn’t help that much. Yes, it’s kind of irksome when the pitching coach trots out slowly, then back, only to have the coach pull a pitchers a few seconds later. But the crowd usually turns pretty strongly against such delaying tactics (at least by the visitors), just as they do about feeble attempts to pick off runners.
Eliminating arguments? Frankly, they don’t annoy me at all. They are almost always the result of a close play, and are to a first approximation never overturned, so there isn’t a huge advantage to pursuing them for a long time, since they aren’t going to change the outcome. I am dead set against any kind of instant replay rules in baseball, because just like timeouts, they slow the pace of the game by introducing an element which doesn’t happen on the field.
Today, I realized that I had written some scripts to dig out information on the web and present it to me in a nice, concise format a couple of years ago, but that they had not been updated. I tinkered them back into fighting form, and then worked on a new one: one that would scrape all the standings information for the major leagues.
And… here’s what the results look like. Not bad.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL STANDINGS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
AMERICAN LEAGUE
WEST CENTRAL EAST
TEX 1-1 - KC 2-0 - BOS 3-1 -
SEA 1-1 - CLE 1-0 0.5 TB 1-0 0.5
ANA 1-1 - MIN 1-1 1.0 NYY 1-0 0.5
OAK 1-3 1.0 CWS 0-1 1.5 TOR 0-1 1.5
DET 0-2 2.0 BAL 0-1 1.5
NATIONAL LEAGUE
WEST CENTRAL EAST
SD 2-0 - MIL 2-0 - WAS 2-0 -
LA 2-0 - PIT 1-0 0.5 NYM 1-1 1.0
COL 1-0 0.5 STL 0-1 1.5 FLA 1-1 1.0
ARI 1-0 0.5 CIN 0-1 1.5 PHI 0-1 1.5
SF 0-2 2.0 HOU 0-2 2.0 ATL 0-2 2.0
CHC 0-2 2.0
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Want to know why baseball is the greatest sport? Check out this article from philosopher John Rawls on the magic of baseball. (Thanks to Matt for bringing this to my attention.)
One stop shopping for the 2008 MLB schedule in .csv format:
wget -r -A.csv -l1 -H -np -nd -erobots=off http://www.mysportscal.com/
I’ll probably make a merged version of them all eventually, but this might be useful in the mean time.
Addendum: Merging the data wasn’t completely straightforward. Not sure that I’ve got it exactly right… but here’s a link to the result. No warranty expressed or implied. Use at your own risk. If you show up at the ballgame at the wrong date or time because of this, don’t come crying to me.
It’s the third game of the World Series, and the score is tied 0-0. If you can’t find any enjoyment in the reality of the game, perhaps the theoretical niceties of the game might provide some distraction:
Me? I enjoy both.
[tags]Baseball, Mathematics[/tags]
David Cortesi has a nice page on scoring baseball games. I haven’t done this myself, but I think it might be a cool way to record games that you enjoy and keep you focussed on the action around you. David uses the Project Scoresheet way, which records more information than traditional scoresheets do, and are amenable to input to computers for further analysis.
His writeup seems very nice.
[tags]Baseball,Scorekeeping[/tags]
My recent purchase of the book Baseball Hacks has made me dust off some my (I must admit impossibly rudimentary) knowledge of statistics and probability and think about baseball in that context.
I think it was several years ago while reading Lewis’ Moneyball that I first became aware of Bill James’ Pythagorean Theorem of Baseball. It states that the expected number of wins for a baseball team is proportional to the ratio of the runs the team scores and the sum of the square of the runs scored and the runs scored against. At the time I heard of this, I really didn’t have much insight as to why that should be (I’m told that James takes five pages to derive it in his 1981 Baseball Abstract, but I don’t have a copy of that) and that kind of bothered me.
So, I set out to try to derive my own formula that would give the expected number of wins. I downloaded the game logs for 2004 and extracted the 162 games that the Oakland Athletics played. They scored 793 runs and had 742 runs scored against them. It turns out that they actually won 91 games. How does that compare to what Bill James predicted? A bit of math and you’ll find that by James’ Pythagorean Formula, it might be expected that they win 86.37 games. Not too bad, but it seems that the A’s might have overperformed a bit.
I tried to derive a similar number by a different tactic. I assumed that baseball scoring is a Poisson process (this is one of many simplifying assumptions that isn’t true, but it simplifies the math). I then wrote a simple little simulator that played random seasons of baseball and totalled the runs that might be expected to yield the total of 793 runs. (Basically, the time to the next score can be generated by getting a uniform random variable u in the range zero to one, and then computing the time to the next score as being -log(u)/r, where r is the average rate (in this case, 793 / 162). You’ll find that you don’t get 793 runs very often, and the distribution of potential results forms a nice looking bell curve.
Fun, but not what we were originally trying to do.
It turns out that you can pretty easily determine for any potential number k what the probability is for a given Poisson random variable to have precisely k occurrances in the unit interval. You can look it up for yourself on Wikipedia, and it’s just a few lines of code to implement. Then, you determine for each possible score, say, home and visitor, what the probability is that the particular combination of scores actually is (which I truncate at 20 runs per team), and simply sum up the cumulative probability.
Well, with one complication: it doesn’t tell us how to score ties. I summed up the probability that tie games would occur, and found that according to the theory, ties should (for the 2004 Athletics) have happened about 21.18 times (they actually happened 19 times in 2004, not bad!). I decided to do the simplest possible thing, and just assume that each team will win 50% of the games which are tied after regulation. So, when I add half the tie percentage to the previously accounted for win percentage, and multiply by 162 games…
I get a prediction that the A’s should have won 87.48 games. And I understand most of the assumptions and math that lead to this conclusion. Neat!
Oh, on the less theoretical front, Chavez, Thomas and Bradley hit three homers yesterday on three consecutive pitches and the A’s won. I tuned in at the top of the 9th in today’s game with the A’s leading 3-1, just in time to see Huston Street leave ball after ball up in the strike zone and get hammered for 4 runs. The A’s would load the bases in the bottom of the ninth, but Swisher flied out to end the game.
It’s best not to lose sight of the game for the mathematics.
[tags]Mathematics,Statistics,Baseball,My Projects[/tags]
One of the most famous games in all of baseball history must be Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, which pitted the Mets against the Red Sox. The Red Sox entered the game leading three games to two, and after nine innings, the game was tied 3-3. The Red Sox scored twice in the top of the 10th to lead by the score of 5-3. You’d think it would be time to pack up the equipment and go home.
But baseball can be a cruel game, and the Curse of the Bambino still lived.
From retrosheet.org’s play by play, the bottom of the tenth went:
METS 10TH: Backman made an out to left; Hernandez flied to center; (Only one out remaining from the Series win) Carter singled to left; MITCHELL BATTED FOR AGUILERA; Mitchell singled to center [Carter to second]; Knight singled to center [Carter scored, Mitchell to third]; STANLEY REPLACED SCHIRALDI (PITCHING); Stanley threw a wild pitch [Mitchell scored, Knight to second]; Wilson reached on an error by Buckner [Knight scored (unearned)]; 3 R, 3 H, 1 E, 1 LOB. Red Sox 5, Mets 6.
Ouch!
Of course, the Mets went on to win game seven and the Series. Buckner was unfairly tagged for the loss (the Sox lleft no less than fourteen runners on base), and it would overshine the entirety of his career ever after.
All this is a rather laborious setup for the following Google Video:
1986 World Series Game Six Re-enacted in RBI Baseball – Google Video
[tags]Baseball,World Series,Red Sox[/tags]
After a shaky opening day performance, Barry Zito came back and pitched six innings, giving up only one hit against the Mariners. Relievers Calero, Kennedy and Street shut the Mariners down the rest of the way, giving up no further hits and giving the Athletics their first shutout of the season. This follows a 2 hit performance yesterday, marking the lowest total for hits in two consecutive games in Mariner’s history.
They will finish up the four game series today. First pitch today at 1:05 PST.
[tags]Oakland Athletics,Barry Zito,Baseball[/tags]
I often listen to sports talk shows while commuting (especially now that I’m on hiatus from my commute time podcasts and baseball season is coming up) and today the AM waves were all atwitter with news of the Sports Illustrated cover story excerpting the upcoming book by Chronicle sportswriters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams presenting documentation that Bonds used a variety of performance enhancing drugs beginning in the 1998 season.
You can read this summary if you like on sfgate.com.
Juiced or not, Bonds was clearly an incredible baseball talent. Prior to the 1998 season, Bonds had amassed 371 career home runs and 417 stolen bases in 12 years in the majors, with seven Golden Gloves and three MVP awards.   The new book claims that in 1998 when Mark McGwire broke the single season home run record, that Bonds was jealous of the attention that it warranted, and resolved to do something about it.
None of this is really all that new, but on the radio fan after fan called in, and I found their comments to be irritating in a number of ways.
I won’t be cheering for Bonds any more, even though he helped treat me to one of the most exciting baseball moments I’ve ever witnessed. It’s not like I think he’s a total sham: as I mentioned, he’s an amazing talent. When he set the single season mark for home runs, he seemingly hit everything that came over the plate, and didn’t swing at anything which didn’t. He was uncanny in his ability to put the bat on the ball.  But go back over each of those 73 hits. If the performance enhancers he was taken add ten feet to the length of his hits, how many homers would have simply been long outs deep to right? Could he have captured that particular record without the boost?
He’ll almost certainly pass Ruth, a chubby guy who smoked and drank.  He may even pass Aaron.  He’ll be undoubtably enshrined in Cooperstown as the greatest homerun hitter (and maybe the best player) of all time, but you won’t get any cheers about it from me.  You see, when you play a game, you should play fairly, or not play at all.  The story of Bonds will always be one of phenomenal talent, tinged by the scandal of doing whatever it took, ethical or not, to gain baseball’s highest honor. I think he’s cheapened the game, irrevocably harmed the integrity of the game. He’s not solely responsible, but he is responsible.
I’d cheer if he failed to break Ruth’s record, because then we wouldn’t have to bring up this sad chapter in baseball everytime home runs are mentioned.
[tags] Baseball, Bonds, Giants, Steroids[/tags]
It begins today, with Korea playing Chinese Taipei at 6:30ET on ESPN. I don’t expect much from this particular game, but I must admit that I’m fairly interested in the World Baseball Classic. Teams to watch?
In Cactus League play, my home town Athletics go up against the Cubs.
Damn, I love this time of year.
[tags]Baseball,Athletics,World Baseball Classic[/tags]
Well, even though he’s no longer an Athletic, I’d like to wish Arizona Diamondback Eric Byrnes centerfielder a happy birthday. I loved to watch Byrnes’ flat out style of play. The last game I saw him play in Oakland, I had seats out in left field, right above where he was playing in left field. I remember a ball hit to the gap between left and center, and just seeing the bottom of Brynes’ shoes as he streaked almost directly away from our position, his cap flying off, and him making a spectacular horizontal flat out dive to rob the batter of what surely would have been an RBI double.
Best birthday wishes Eric!
[tags]Baseball, Eric Byrnes, Oakland Athletics[/tags]