CUT4: Why 9 innings? Why 4 balls?

[DrungoHazewood]

4 minutes ago, Can_of_corn said:

You might have to adjust the ball to keep it from becoming beer league softball out there.  Unless of course you want 30 runs a game.

A lot of early baseball games (say, pre-1870) were 30 runs a game.  The 1871 NA scored almost 10.5 runs per team per game.  I'm still not entirely clear on why that pretty abruptly went to under five by 1880.  Certainly by 1870 pitchers were trying to actively get batters out.  I guess some of it was the changing pitching rules.  Probably with a dash of better fielding, and strategies evolving to modern ideas like infielders positioning themselves away from the bases.

[scOtt]

3 hours ago, DrungoHazewood said:

I've long been curious about a form of baseball that went back to the early paradigm of putting the ball in play almost all the time.  You could make the rule that a walk was two or three bases, the strike zone bottom of the knees to top of shoulders, and move the mound back to about 75'.  Or just recreate the rules of 1875 - pitchers had to throw underhand and put limits on snapping the wrist and bending the elbow.

Jenny Finch disagrees.

[scOtt]

[scOtt]

 

[Barnaby Graves]

Drungo,

In all honesty how valuable do you think early statistics are?

Some are obvious, like "Babe Ruth hit a lot of home runs."  I can accept that without thinking too hard.

Walks, strikeouts, stolen bases, things counted as hits or whether something was a "double" or a "single and an error" etc.  How robust were the efforts of official scorers and umpires.  Everything that happens today is verified by technology and the amount of money in the game ensures some quality assurance.  Where do the early stats even come from?  If I read the stats sheet of a guy from the 1890s, what is the source, how good are these sources?  Is it a statistical interpretation of something more abstract, or more concrete?  You really know this historical stuff well so I want you to illuminate...

[scOtt]

40 minutes ago, Barnaby Graves said:

Drungo,

In all honesty how valuable do you think early statistics are?

Some are obvious, like "Babe Ruth hit a lot of home runs."  I can accept that without thinking too hard.

Walks, strikeouts, stolen bases, things counted as hits or whether something was a "double" or a "single and an error" etc.  How robust were the efforts of official scorers and umpires.  Everything that happens today is verified by technology and the amount of money in the game ensures some quality assurance.  Where do the early stats even come from?  If I read the stats sheet of a guy from the 1890s, what is the source, how good are these sources?  Is it a statistical interpretation of something more abstract, or more concrete?  You really know this historical stuff well so I want you to illuminate...

I'm not Drungo but I think the old stats are accurate at least. They've been religiously scored and tabulated since baseball time immemorial. As for the umps and official scorers? I'd guess they are exactly equal to the umps and scorers we have to this day. Sans replay...

[DrungoHazewood]

On 1/14/2017 at 4:24 PM, Barnaby Graves said:

Drungo,

In all honesty how valuable do you think early statistics are?

Some are obvious, like "Babe Ruth hit a lot of home runs."  I can accept that without thinking too hard.

Walks, strikeouts, stolen bases, things counted as hits or whether something was a "double" or a "single and an error" etc.  How robust were the efforts of official scorers and umpires.  Everything that happens today is verified by technology and the amount of money in the game ensures some quality assurance.  Where do the early stats even come from?  If I read the stats sheet of a guy from the 1890s, what is the source, how good are these sources?  Is it a statistical interpretation of something more abstract, or more concrete?  You really know this historical stuff well so I want you to illuminate...

Probably as accurate as the scoring of a high school game today.  But with rules going back to even before the professional leagues in 1871 about what stats get kept.  

I think that when you read that someone hit .300 in 1884 you can be reasonably certain they hit something like .300 by the standards of the day.  But you have to acknowledge that what a hit isn't what a hit is today, when you were in an era with no gloves, dramatically lower quality of play and quality of athletes, field conditions in many cases worse than your local Little League field, rules changing annually, years where more than half of all runs were unearned, and on and on and on.  

I find 19th century baseball endlessly fascinating, but Ryan Flaherty might hit .500 if you put him in a time machine and dropped him into 1894.  Or maybe .600.  Real players hit well over .400 in '94.  There were documented cases of paying fans ending up playing in the game in the 1800s.  19 year olds winning 47 games in a season as a pitcher.  In many, many ways Major League baseball in 1885 or 1900 was less advanced than college ball is today.

And Babe Ruth played in a league with fewer quality players than the Japanese Leagues have today.