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Old 12-29-2021, 06:12 PM   #1
Syd Thrift
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Baseball and probabilty

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!
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Old 12-31-2021, 05:25 PM   #2
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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!
I'm a numbers guy. I taught university level statistics for about eight years. Hell..I have enough tax training to be able to sign other's tax returns, and them are pretty darned complex.

Baseball was my first love, about 60 years ago. I started playing Strat back about 1967, and kept elaborate stats.

The synergy between sports and statistics is stronger for baseball than for any other sport I can think of. Baseball, to watch, can be boring as hell...but when I play strat, and the 2006 Pujols has three bombs already, and it's only the sixth inning, I get excited!
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Old 01-02-2022, 02:58 PM   #3
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Just remember, people are not numbers. Don’t reduce living beings into soulless statistics. Baseball and other sports are boring because we’re constantly having every stat imaginable shoved in our faces. We’re the losing the most important part of sports and that is its humanity.

Example: I’m sure someone, somewhere can dig up all the stats they want to show how Kurt Warner was this diamond in the rough player who just got his one chance under a coach and system that allowed him to become one of the most feared passers of his time. But who cares? What matters is a man never gave up on his dream, took a chance after being turned away so many times, then when that chance mattered, he grabbed it and eventually became a HoFer.

Reducing everything to stats and probability and numbers will be the death bell of sports and life.
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Old 01-02-2022, 04:28 PM   #4
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Just remember, people are not numbers. Don’t reduce living beings into soulless statistics. Baseball and other sports are boring because we’re constantly having every stat imaginable shoved in our faces. We’re the losing the most important part of sports and that is its humanity.

Example: I’m sure someone, somewhere can dig up all the stats they want to show how Kurt Warner was this diamond in the rough player who just got his one chance under a coach and system that allowed him to become one of the most feared passers of his time. But who cares? What matters is a man never gave up on his dream, took a chance after being turned away so many times, then when that chance mattered, he grabbed it and eventually became a HoFer.

Reducing everything to stats and probability and numbers will be the death bell of sports and life.
You are entitled to your opinion but please don't tell me or any other person how we should enjoy sports or what we should talk about on a Baseball/Sports forum.

Bad form sir!
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Old 01-02-2022, 05:46 PM   #5
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Obviously not everything can be predicted by statistics or Albert Pujols would not have been drafted in the 13th Round, but the depth of statistics available on a historical basis is unmatched in any other sport. What other sport can you have a debate on who is better someone from 1927(Babe Ruth) or 2021(Mike Trout)? Statistics only enhances the enjoyability of the sport. This is why a team like the Tampa Bay Rays, with a $70M payroll, can go toe to toe with a team like the New York Yankees, a team with a $215M payroll. So as a fan of a small market team, the Seattle Mariners, don't tell me that statistics don't matter, as a matter of history or current baseball economics.
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Old 01-02-2022, 07:08 PM   #6
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I'm all about following players and personality and it's one big reason why I like the NBA. That said, you can kind of do both. Is Roberto Clemente any less of a humanitarian because he's merely 25th in career WAR (I'm actually a little surprised he's as high as he is)? Did Dimaggio's 56 game hitting streak (which is itself a statistic) not exist because Ted Williams was clearly better than he was during their careers? Was the season that Mark Fidrych had not a fun footnote to baseball history because he got hit-lucky (though truth be had a .250 BABIP, which is below the league mark during his career of .284 but only by around on standard deviation; it's actually not that big of an outlier)? I feel like the answer is "no" to all three but I guess YMMV.

The one thing I will say about our study of sports stats and sports economics is that sometimes unintended consequences happen. In basketball I think people realizing that inside shooting and 3 shooting are the two most efficient ways of scoring has led to the game opening way up, scoring going through the roof, and the game just in general becoming far, far more athletic than it's ever been (the days when every team had a big stiff at center who could do nothing but block shots are long, long over, and now the game is fairly dominated by guys between 6'4" and 6'8"). I think football has also become way, way more fun to watch now that people understand that the running game is mostly useless unless you're ahead and trying to kill the clock.

Baseball, though... man, I do appreciate the advances we've made in stats, but... I kind of wish we never learned how important the Three True Outcomes are for pitchers. That's led to everyone striking out as many people as they can at the expense of stamina (and similar advancements in our knowledge of the game has led hitters to miss pitches much more than they used to) and the game now takes longer than it ever has taken, which itself would probably be okay except that strikeouts are just not as fun to watch as balls in play.

In doing research for the dynasty I'm running (a fictionalized league with historical teams, franchise shifts, and so on that started in 1946 and is now in 1970) I picked up the 1987 edition of the Bill James Great American Baseball Stat Book. Remember that meme where TV announcers would say that Player X is 4-13 in Friday games in the 7th inning when his mom is in the stands? I feel like this book may have been the genesis of a lot of that. There's lots of stuff in there, some of it a little silly in retrospect (for example, the Don Mattingly write-up says he's a sure-fire HOFer; another one on Dennis Rasmussen says he should pitch more during the day because anomaly hunting) but absolutely nothing that shows they had any idea of the FIP "revolution" that was around 10 years away. It just seems so, so obvious now but back then even the statheads thought you could sustain a career with low K totals (which, TBF, I guess you can; you just have to not walk anyone or give up HRs).

We're of course never going to get back to that and my own ideas for a solution to this issue - move the mound back, look at making the baseball larger, perhaps - will be hated by purists, but in a way I do kind of agree with them that I sort of wish we hadn't opened that one particular Pandora's Box...
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Old 01-02-2022, 07:42 PM   #7
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Don't even get me started on the ban the shift debate.
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Old 01-02-2022, 08:53 PM   #8
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Don't even get me started on the ban the shift debate.
Yeah… for all the whinging going on about the shift, BABIP is down all of 8 points from its historic highs and is roughly the same amount higher than it was in the early 90s (when it sat around .285).
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Old 01-02-2022, 11:13 PM   #9
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Don't even get me started on the ban the shift debate.
Football requires five men on the line of scrimmage. The NBA doesn't allow the defender to spend more than three seconds at a time in the paint.

Hockey doesn't allow players past the blue line before the puck crosses.

Soccer doesn't allow a 'keeper to handle the ball beyond the 12 meter line.

What do these all have in common? They're restrictions on placement and movement, designed to keep or restore competitive balance.

I don't have a dog in this hunt..but I saw Matt Carpenter's career ruined because he couldn't, or wouldn't, hit the ball to the left side of the field. The dude hit .202 over his last 900+ plate appearances..and prior to the shift, he was an excellent player.

If you were to produce a rule that there can only be two infielders on each side of second base, and that all infielders have to be stationed on the dirt, I would be OK with that.
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Old 01-03-2022, 12:01 AM   #10
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Football actually requires the offense to have seven players on the line of scrimmage.

I don't think banning the shift is going to solve baseball's problems.
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Old 01-03-2022, 08:33 AM   #11
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Football requires five men on the line of scrimmage. The NBA doesn't allow the defender to spend more than three seconds at a time in the paint.

Hockey doesn't allow players past the blue line before the puck crosses.

Soccer doesn't allow a 'keeper to handle the ball beyond the 12 meter line.

What do these all have in common? They're restrictions on placement and movement, designed to keep or restore competitive balance.

I don't have a dog in this hunt..but I saw Matt Carpenter's career ruined because he couldn't, or wouldn't, hit the ball to the left side of the field. The dude hit .202 over his last 900+ plate appearances..and prior to the shift, he was an excellent player.

If you were to produce a rule that there can only be two infielders on each side of second base, and that all infielders have to be stationed on the dirt, I would be OK with that.
Again, BABIP last year was .292. It was .300 a couple years ago and .285 in the early 90s. If the shift really did have this huge effect you’re implying it has, you’d see balls in play turned into outs at a far greater rate than we’re seeing. Instead, it’s helped to cause at best a 3% drop in that stat. As for Matt Carpenter, he struck out in 28% and 30% of his PAs the last 2 seasons after never striking out more than 22% of the time prior to 2017. His BABIP was low-ish, around a standard deviation below average, but the K rates are what did him in.
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Old 01-03-2022, 08:38 AM   #12
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Football actually requires the offense to have seven players on the line of scrimmage.

I don't think banning the shift is going to solve baseball's problems.
Football requires 7 men on the line because in the early 1900s they ran a play called the flying wedge where players would start like 20 yards behind the line, interlock arms, and just run full speed at the defense with the ball carrier nestled just behind this wall of players. The primary way defenses had to stop the wedge was to leap over it, which, in the days before modern helmets and padding, caused a lot of broken necks (TBF it’d probably cause a lot of broken necks today if players did that a lot). More than 30 players died playing (mostly college) football one year and President Theodore Roosevelt threatened to ban the sport if something wasn’t done about it quick.

Baseball is experiencing a 2-3% drop in BABIP because some players can’t beat the shift. These are not comparable events.
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Old 01-03-2022, 12:20 PM   #13
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Football requires 7 men on the line because in the early 1900s they ran a play called the flying wedge where players would start like 20 yards behind the line, interlock arms, and just run full speed at the defense with the ball carrier nestled just behind this wall of players. The primary way defenses had to stop the wedge was to leap over it, which, in the days before modern helmets and padding, caused a lot of broken necks (TBF it’d probably cause a lot of broken necks today if players did that a lot). More than 30 players died playing (mostly college) football one year and President Theodore Roosevelt threatened to ban the sport if something wasn’t done about it quick.

Baseball is experiencing a 2-3% drop in BABIP because some players can’t beat the shift. These are not comparable events.
The Flying Wedge was banned in 1894, two years after it was introduced and years before Teddy R was elected President.

TR threatened football in 1905 and the response was to change the rules to a seven man line with only one man in motion so teams could not send three guys in motion to gain momentum to crack into the defenders, thus causing injuries. Fielding Yost of Michigan (and its 'Point a minute' offense) was the major offender at the time.
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Old 01-03-2022, 01:47 PM   #14
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The Flying Wedge was banned in 1894, two years after it was introduced and years before Teddy R was elected President.

TR threatened football in 1905 and the response was to change the rules to a seven man line with only one man in motion so teams could not send three guys in motion to gain momentum to crack into the defenders, thus causing injuries. Fielding Yost of Michigan (and its 'Point a minute' offense) was the major offender at the time.
Thanks for the clarification; I think the issue at hand was that while the wedge was technically banned, the ideas behind it were still very much in the game and had to be legislated out because people were literally dying every week. I remember how tragic it was when Curtis Williams was paralyzed after a bad hit while playing for my alma mater the Washington Huskies in the early 2000s (he succumbed to his injuries a year later); I can’t even imagine how the nation would react if there were 30 such hits in one season.
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Old 01-03-2022, 05:31 PM   #15
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MLB is upset at the shift because it reduces offense, but is also upset at longer games which is caused by more offense. The fact is defensive strategy is part of the game and shouldn't be messed with. MLB needs to make up their mind.
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Old 01-03-2022, 06:43 PM   #16
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MLB is upset at the shift because it reduces offense, but is also upset at longer games which is caused by more offense. The fact is defensive strategy is part of the game and shouldn't be messed with. MLB needs to make up their mind.
The longer games aren't caused by more offense. We haven't gotten any more offense. MLB average last year was 4.53 runs per game, exactly the same as it was in 1961. Every season of the 1930's had a higher scoring average. The games weren't going three hours each back then. The longer games are caused by micromanagement and excessive pitching changes.
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Old 01-03-2022, 08:41 PM   #17
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The longer games aren't caused by more offense. We haven't gotten any more offense. MLB average last year was 4.53 runs per game, exactly the same as it was in 1961. Every season of the 1930's had a higher scoring average. The games weren't going three hours each back then. The longer games are caused by micromanagement and excessive pitching changes.
Strikeouts take 3-6 pitches. Multiply this by 25 times a game.
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Old 01-03-2022, 09:14 PM   #18
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The longer games aren't caused by more offense. We haven't gotten any more offense. MLB average last year was 4.53 runs per game, exactly the same as it was in 1961. Every season of the 1930's had a higher scoring average. The games weren't going three hours each back then. The longer games are caused by micromanagement and excessive pitching changes.
Even all the pitching changes might add 5 to 10 minutes to the game. It's the fact that there are just plain so many pitches thrown - which, speaking of, I'm convinced that part of the reason why pitchers have relatively little stamina nowadays is that you could put a guy on a 100 pitch count as recently as the 1980s and still get 6+ innings out of them on average (the Astros did that with Nolan Ryan, who was even a pretty high pitch count guy for the era). Now 90-100 pitches carries you into the 5th, maybe the 6th.

And on top of that players take a lot more time than they used to between pitches, which is something that MLB has kind of tried to half-assedly address.
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Old 01-03-2022, 09:28 PM   #19
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Originally Posted by dsvitak View Post
Strikeouts take 3-6 pitches. Multiply this by 25 times a game.
Taking more pitches has not resulted in more offense, as was the contention.
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Old 01-03-2022, 09:38 PM   #20
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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.
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