One of the things I love about baseball is that failure is not only always an option; statistically speaking, it's the norm.

I mean, since someone already brought him up, let's take Babe Ruth as an example. He's still considered one of the benchmark great hitters today, and he had a lifetime batting average of .342. That means nearly 66% of the time he came up to bat, he didn't get a base hit. That doesn't mean he struck out, necessarily, since that percentage also includes things like instances in which he hit the ball, but didn't make it to first base because someone caught it and/or got it to the first baseman before he reached the bag*. Which probably also happened quite a lot, since like many power hitters, Babe wasn't what you would call a real baserunning threat. :)

(Edit: Walks aren't included because BA is calculated by dividing hits by at bats, and as Offsides pointed out, an "at bat" does not include walks. The stat I was thinking of, "plate appearances", does, but that would skew batting averages dismayingly low.)

In a game where you're doing really well if you only fail two-thirds of the time, well... I dunno, it appeals to that British part of my ancestry that craves and appreciates disappointment, I think.

(As you can probably tell from the above, another thing I love about baseball is that it's all very statisticky. Lots of math, all of it simple, but lots of it, and as the correction above demonstrates, it pays to keep your variables straight. :)

On the other hand, because the sample size you're working with is so large - 162 games per team in a regular season, 30 teams in the major leagues, so 2430 regular-season games all told, which works out to a really spectacular number of individual plays - there's a lot of room for really wacky outlier moments on both sides of the success/failure line.

So, on the one hand, you get the aforementioned fact that great batters still fail around two-thirds of the time, and many similarly lopsided statistical realtiies; and on the other, you get days like that one in 1999 when Nomar Garciaparra hit two grand slams in the same game. (Even Nomar - never a man to doubt his own prowess - seemed startled that he'd done that. :) You get a nearly unending procession of pitchers whose names you're not even going to remember after the game, and then one day you get to see Pedro Martinez at the peak of his powers, sitting down members of the Minnesota Twins like they had dinner reservations in the visitors' dugout and he was the maître d'.

As with so many things, I have an off-and-on relationship with professional baseball, but unlike some other things where I consistently keep wondering why I've waded back into the pond, it's good at reminding me why I keep coming back. There's sketchy conduct on the field sometimes, and bureaucratic horseshit aplenty in the front office, and sometimes you just want to smack the entire institution in the face... but then there are moments like those, and everything's OK again. :)

--G.
* It also doesn't include the so-called "sacrifice" plays, but that gets quite abstruse indeed.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Offsides

[...] in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.
-- David Ben Gurion
EPU RCW #π
#include <stdsig.h>

In the Honor Harrington series by David Weber, Harrington's adopted world Grayson ends up seemingly being the only planet left in the know galaxy that still plays baseball.

The first mention of the game appears in 'Flag in Exile', during a period of political unrest, including several mass demonstrations that had led to moderately serious scuffles between the various factions.

Harrington panics when she sees a number of men heading across her steading carrying wooden cudgels, thinking that her colonists had finally decided to move up from fists to deal with the protesting crowds.

The scene, and the pure confusion of her personal armsman at his Steadholder calling out the troops to stop the coming beat-down, was easily one of the most amusing in the entire series.

Brian

See, the Texas Rangers aren't a bad team this year. They're on top of the American League West, in fact, with a record of 35 wins and 22 losses so far. And yet, one of those losses was last night, to the Red Sox (also a strong team so far this year, so it wasn't as hideously embarrassing as it could've been, but still)...

... by a score of 17 to 5.

But that's not the wacky outlier part. Starting pitchers and relievers get shelled sometimes, it happens. No, the wacky outlier part is that the only inning in which the Sox came up to bat and didn't score at least one run was the eighth.

An inning in which the Rangers did not field an actual pitcher.

Seriously. Last night was the first game of a long road trip for the Rangers, they were losing spectacularly, and their manager decided he didn't want to use up the entire roster of relief pitchers in the pursuit of a single lost cause, so for the 8th, he put their left fielder, a guy named David Murphy, who probably hadn't pitched since high school, on the pitcher's mound...

... and he gave up one hit and no runs, by far the Rangers' best pitching performance of the night. (Well, there was that one guy who didn't give up a hit either, but then, he was only in for one batter. Murphy was out there for the whole half-inning.)

When he struck out Sox first baseman Mike Carp, Carp was so startled he argued the call and got ejected by the home plate umpire, prompting guest color commentator Dennis Eckersley to remark, "You don't see somebody get that upset in a 17-5 game normally."

(The Eck had been writhing in pain the whole night, because he's a Hall of Fame pitcher and last night was basically a ritual slaughter of pitchers. Slightly on both sides - I mean, giving up 5 runs is not a performance for the ages on the Sox pitching staff's part either, it's just that in this case it was rendered moot by the circumstances.) For a non-pitcher to then come out and symbolically salvage the honor of the Rangers' defense was slightly more than he could bear, I think. :)

See, now, that's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. That kind of stuff doesn't happen in football (or futbol, either). :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

There's the various position players playing pitcher (The earlier comment about Flamethrower (who may be the most terrifying person in baseball) reminded me of this) Jose Canseco pitched a game (against the Red Sox, amusingly enough) during which he destroyed his arm.

Also, I was talking with someone once about Jim Abbott (my personal favorite baseball player Of All Time). They didn't believe me that a one handed person was a major league baseball pitcher. So, I looked him up on the internets, and, upon reading his stats came to the realization that he actually has a couple of hits. 2 hits in 21 AB (So a BA of .095). With one hand.

--
-Pasha ("At all levels, teams tried to exploit his fielding disadvantage by repeatedly bunting to him; this tactic was never effective."