Baseball and probabilty

[pilight]

Originally Posted by monkeyman576

The contention was that more hits will lengthen games compared to fewer hits. I wasn't making any reference to what the actual offensive stats were, in the 60s, today or any other era.

There certainly aren't more hits than in past years when the games were shorter

[dsvitak]

Originally Posted by pilight

Taking more pitches has not resulted in more offense, as was the contention.

Taking more pitches isn't a bad thing. Swinging from the heels and missing 100 times a game is a bad thing.

[monkeyman576]

Originally Posted by pilight

There certainly aren't more hits than in past years when the games were shorter

There are other factors in play but in a vacuum more hits and more pitches do cause longer games.

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by monkeyman576

There are other factors in play but in a vacuum more hits and more pitches do cause longer games.

More plate appearances do but PAs per game have gone down since the 90s and games are still longer now than they were then. This past year, games took 3:10 to play per 9 innings, a new record. In 1995, when there was a lot more offense than there is today, games took 2:50 to play. If you go back to 1985, which is a couple years before the A's won the World Series and made everyone in the league copy their bullpen strategy, games averaged 2:39 per 9 innings.

[monkeyman576]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

More plate appearances do but PAs per game have gone down since the 90s and games are still longer now than they were then. This past year, games took 3:10 to play per 9 innings, a new record. In 1995, when there was a lot more offense than there is today, games took 2:50 to play. If you go back to 1985, which is a couple years before the A's won the World Series and made everyone in the league copy their bullpen strategy, games averaged 2:39 per 9 innings.

You're making no sense. Obviously there are other things that are causing games to be longer, like more pitching changes. That doesn't mean that more hits don't cause longer games.

[pilight]

Originally Posted by monkeyman576

There are other factors in play but in a vacuum more hits and more pitches do cause longer games.

If there were more hits now you might have a point, but there aren't. There were 8.13 hits per team game last season, one of the lowest rates in MLB history.

[RchW]

Isn't the break between innings much longer now? An extra 90 sec is plus 25 min, longer if the home team bats in the 9th.

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by monkeyman576

You're making no sense. Obviously there are other things that are causing games to be longer, like more pitching changes. That doesn't mean that more hits don't cause longer games.

More pitches are what causes longer games. More hits can lead to longer games by causing more pitches to be thrown, but the actual common denominator is not hits, it's pitches, and the fact that you're not seeing this is, frankly, bizarre to me.

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by RchW

Isn't the break between innings much longer now? An extra 90 sec is plus 25 min, longer if the home team bats in the 9th.

It was 90 seconds at least as far back as 2001, when I worked for the radio station that in Seattle that carried the Mariners, and the game is yet longer than it was back then.

[pilight]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

More pitches are what causes longer games. More hits can lead to longer games by causing more pitches to be thrown, but the actual common denominator is not hits, it's pitches, and the fact that you're not seeing this is, frankly, bizarre to me.

We only have data on pitch numbers back to the late 80's. The number of pitches per game in 2021 was 8.7% higher than 1988 but the games averaged 13% longer so there's more to it than that.

[monkeyman576]

Like I said, more pitching changes also factor in to the longer games. I'm not sure about time between pitches.

[RchW]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

It was 90 seconds at least as far back as 2001, when I worked for the radio station that in Seattle that carried the Mariners, and the game is yet longer than it was back then.

It's more like 3-4 minutes now. I was indicating that an extra 90 sec per 1/2 inning adds a minimum of 25 min to game time. Playoff games have more time added.

[Westheim]

Originally Posted by RchW

It's more like 3-4 minutes now. I was indicating that an extra 90 sec per 1/2 inning adds a minimum of 25 min to game time. Playoff games have more time added.

As someone who regularly watched Mets games the day after the last few years via MLB.tv I can assure you that the between-inning break in regular season games is pretty much the 2:05 minutes that it has been said to be. Basically, if you skip exactly two minutes from Gary Cohen sending you to the ads, you come back out where he retrieves you from it, and the other team's bum is on the mound, ready to pitch.

In-inning pitching changes can be a bit more fiddly than above.

This is not true in the playoffs. I think there's an extra 30-second ad in there per break.

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by RchW

It's more like 3-4 minutes now. I was indicating that an extra 90 sec per 1/2 inning adds a minimum of 25 min to game time. Playoff games have more time added.

It’s really, really not though. Television, radio, and the local sports network all have to coordinate these things together and it has to be very, very tight or else it sounds sloppy and unprofessional. If it’s gone to 2:05 from 90 seconds that could add some time, but it’s certainly not 3-4 minutes.

[dsvitak]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

It’s really, really not though. Television, radio, and the local sports network all have to coordinate these things together and it has to be very, very tight or else it sounds sloppy and unprofessional. If it’s gone to 2:05 from 90 seconds that could add some time, but it’s certainly not 3-4 minutes.

St. Louis Cardinals' broadcasts routinely miss the first pitch back from commercial break. They have cut it as fine as they can. Even an extra thirty seconds, 18 times gives you nine additional minutes. Lot more than commercial breaks going on. Hell..no, there are short breaks DURING the game, on split screen.

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by dsvitak

St. Louis Cardinals' broadcasts routinely miss the first pitch back from commercial break. They have cut it as fine as they can. Even an extra thirty seconds, 18 times gives you nine additional minutes. Lot more than commercial breaks going on. Hell..no, there are short breaks DURING the game, on split screen.

They come back late because the Cardinals' producers come back at 2:05 on the dot, period. Again, they have to because if they don't then everyone has to sit around for several seconds and it looks unprofessional.

I still think the biggest issue, aside from the sheer number of pitches thrown in games nowadays, is the time taken between pitches. I've been watching some 60s and 70s era games while playing my dynasty and there's just not as much time taken by hitters or pitchers in between pitches. Hitters call time and exit the batter's box but not literally every single pitch the way you see happen nowadays. I think this is a thing that kind of crept up on the game from the early 80s to, I don't know, I think it hit its head some time in the early 2000s, and now MLB seems to be all but powerless to get hitters to stop (in part because MLB umpires are pretty much the biggest snowflakes in terms of officiating in all pro sports and it's not particularly close).

I will say, too, that the time itself is a thing I think you can cite as to a sign that the games are more drawn out and boring nowadays, but I don't think it's necessarily a thing that actually makes the games more boring per se. Both football and basketball take longer than they ever have and both games are way, way more exciting than they were 40 or 50 years ago (I will say that basketball is kind of great in that a game is still only around 2 hours 20 minutes on average - it's like going to see a long-ish movie and when you go to see one that starts at 7, you're out of the building by 9:30 most nights and at home by 10:30). What makes modern baseball hard to watch for me isn't so much the time, it isn't even so much all the time between pitches, it's the fact that the majority of at-bats end without a ball being put into play. Sure, homers can be exciting. but after a point when mostly all you're seeing is guys strike out, walk, or hit dingers then the game just feels... static and boring to me at least.

[pilight]

I agree entirely that the length of the games is less of an issue than the lack of action.

Look at college football. Those games take forever. Four hour games are commonplace. Few people complain about them taking too long.

[pilight]

Originally Posted by pilight

Look at college football. Those games take forever. Four hour games are commonplace. Few people complain about them taking too long.

The national championship game came in just under four hours. Few people are going to be complaining it took too long.

[dsvitak]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

They come back late because the Cardinals' producers come back at 2:05 on the dot, period. Again, they have to because if they don't then everyone has to sit around for several seconds and it looks unprofessional.

I still think the biggest issue, aside from the sheer number of pitches thrown in games nowadays, is the time taken between pitches. I've been watching some 60s and 70s era games while playing my dynasty and there's just not as much time taken by hitters or pitchers in between pitches. Hitters call time and exit the batter's box but not literally every single pitch the way you see happen nowadays. I think this is a thing that kind of crept up on the game from the early 80s to, I don't know, I think it hit its head some time in the early 2000s, and now MLB seems to be all but powerless to get hitters to stop (in part because MLB umpires are pretty much the biggest snowflakes in terms of officiating in all pro sports and it's not particularly close).

I will say, too, that the time itself is a thing I think you can cite as to a sign that the games are more drawn out and boring nowadays, but I don't think it's necessarily a thing that actually makes the games more boring per se. Both football and basketball take longer than they ever have and both games are way, way more exciting than they were 40 or 50 years ago (I will say that basketball is kind of great in that a game is still only around 2 hours 20 minutes on average - it's like going to see a long-ish movie and when you go to see one that starts at 7, you're out of the building by 9:30 most nights and at home by 10:30). What makes modern baseball hard to watch for me isn't so much the time, it isn't even so much all the time between pitches, it's the fact that the majority of at-bats end without a ball being put into play. Sure, homers can be exciting. but after a point when mostly all you're seeing is guys strike out, walk, or hit dingers then the game just feels... static and boring to me at least.

You think the modern era is bad? My sweetspot for baseball was about 1964 to 1970, when our family moved to Italy. You waited for Killebrew or McCovey to hit one out, and if you were lucky, it was a two run shot.

This is how Jimmy Wynn for the Astros can knock in more than 1/6th of his team's runs, and only have 107 for the season.

[syridihep]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

I wrote this gigantic rambling essay on how I think AI could be "improved" (read: made even more sloppy) and I wanted to include something about probability but the thing was already too long. So instead I'll put it here.

The Stand Up Maths guy, Matt Parker, did a thing with the woman who does the Numberphile YouTube channel, Hannah Fry, where they demonstrated Bayesian probability by putting an X on a table, and having Matt toss beanbags onto the table to try and figure out where the X was. He couldn't see the table and was only told a. where his beanbag landed, and b. if it was to the left or right and up or down from where the X was. I'm having problems finding that video - I guess it's pretty old - but trust me, it's out there! If you go to either of their YT pages you'll probably see it.

Anyway, it strikes me that this is basically what baseball, or at least the OOTP implementation of baseball, is. For any given hitter, you have, say, a weirdly shaped, loaded die, and rather than being told what the given chances are of that die landing on any particular number, all you get is the face it came up as. On any given day, the "die" that comes with a .240 hitter could go 0 for 5 or it could go 3 for 5. Over time, you hope that the result set you get is indicative of the shape of the die, but even with everything else being equal it's really not: over the course of a 550 at bat season the standard deviation for batting average is IIRC around 30 points. So if you roll that one misshapen die 550 times and that die's real, actual value is it should give you a hit 27% of the time, 1/3rd of the time you make 550 rolls it will give you hits 24% of the time or less or 30% of the time or more.

But on top of that, everything isn't always equal. On any given day a player could be facing a pitcher they're especially bad at getting hits against (this is probably much less of a factor in OOTP than in real life but it is a small factor... although handedness is potentially a kind of big one). You'd hope that this evens out over time but depending on the size of the sample it may not. Some hitters do very poorly against certain pitcher types - a guy with a low Avoid Ks for instance tends to be just plain destroyed by a pitcher with high Stuff because of the way the game engine works, where it determines the Three True Outcomes before it looks at anything else (FWIW I think this is a pretty accurate approximation of how baseball works from a probabilistic standpoint - of course, real life baseball, like real life everything else, is based on... a lot of real life stuff). A guy who does nothing but pinch-hit likely faces more quality pitching than a guy who plays in the lineup every day. A guy fighting an injury will make his "die" come up with fewer hits.

And then on top of that the die can change over time, due to aging and development but also just due to random chance. In real life of course it's never ascribed to random chance - a pitcher improves because he worked on his mechanics, a hitter suddenly stopped hitting for power because word got around the league that he couldn't hit the curve and so he started seeing nothing but curves - but in video games you can't literally account for everything you could possibly account for and so you need randomness instead. And also, crap's random in real life way more than people think it is but humans are wired to hate randomness as an explanation.

Anyway, what I'm getting at here is that this is why baseball interests me from a nerdy stathead perspective. You never truly "know" if a player is as good as they're hitting at any given point in time. I mean, very, very improbable right now that Mike Trout is only average at hitting baseballs, but there's still a tiny, tiny chance that that is true. And for guys like, say, Evan White... I am reasonably sure that he's not a .144 hitter, but can I really and truly be positive of that? No, no I can't, but the only way I can really know for sure is by putting him in the lineup every day.

So... as it applies to playing and watching baseball... I think people should look at this as a feature rather than as a bug. Embrace not knowing for sure if your .105 hitting second baseman is just in a slump or if they're really that bad. Turn off the things that tell you definitively if they are. Those are cheats, essentially. You don't get that in real life, not in baseball but also not in whatever it is you actually do. In baseball you do get scouts and scouting reports who tell you they think a guy has a swing that projects him to Ken Griffey Jr. or a fastball that hits 99 on the gun, but those same scouts told GMs they should draft guys 25 years ago that because they had a good "baseball face", and who is to say that stride mechanics or FB velocity aren't the baseball face of 2021?

Play the game (and live your life) however you want to, of course, but I feel like people in general just spend way too much time trying to figure out what is a sure thing and what isn't instead of accepting that there will always be risks and chances. That doesn't mean you should do stupid, risky things - that's part of "grokking" probability, understanding that a 0.1% chance is super low but if the stakes are high enough and the consequences of doing the other thing aren't very large at all, there's no reason to even take that tiny chance - but it absolutely means that you need to get comfortable with uncertainty. Sometimes stuff will just not go your way and life will suck. Refusing to take a low-risk, high-reward move because of this isn't a good way to go about life, though. And conversely if you're lucky enough to have had some good things go your way, it's good to have the humility to accept that at least some random chance was involved to get you there (even if you, say, also had to work hard to get where you did).

(sorry if I'm speaking in generalities here - I personally like to be much, much more specific, generally, but I also feel like there are very particular political rabbit-holes that the above paragraph could go down and rather than do that I'll leave you to think about what these situations and this thinking means for yourself)

So, you know, trust science and analytics and all of that... but also accept that not really and truly knowing deep and underlying truths is part of baseball and of life. And given that it's always going to be there and won't go away no matter what you do, try to have fun in the sea of improbability. The world is chaotic. Embrace the chaos!

You're so good at essay writing and know enough about sports. I would like to have someone like you when I studied in college and needed to write many papers. Don't you mind if I save your essay just to read sometimes?