Darunia's Baseball Discussion Thread

[A Black Falcon]

Oh come on, like you think that if I really wanted to I couldn't write twice that much about how complex baseball is? Yeah. Of course I could. But that would probably be a waste of time... a few points though.

1. Hitting a baseball is the most challenging thing in sports. This is obvious when you look at batting averages. The best hitters to have ever lived might, if they are lucky, manage to hit four times out of ten over the course of a season once in their career... and even that hasn't happened in sixty years. Nothing else compares to the batter/pitcher duel that is the centerpoint of baseball. Not even remotely close.

2. You spend a lot of time there talking about how the positioning of each player matters so much. It is equally so in baseball, or any sport. You don't just send the players out into the field and expect them to figure out where to be on their own! Positioning your players is a very complex task... do you back them up for a power hitter, making more sure that the ball won't go past them but making a hit more likely, or move them forward, hoping for a catch but knowing that if they miss it'll probably go for extra bases... do you do a shift (moving the players over towards one side of the field or another) for some specific good players who you know always hit on one side or the other... what pitches to throw and where (you belittle it, but this is a very involved, complex process which can involve large numbers of statistics -- how has batter X done against pitcher Y's curveball over the course of his career? Against Y's fastball? Etc. Baseball is a game of numbers, and the stats are a central and vital part of the game, more so than in the other sports. In football or soccer or something it's harder to isolate out one person's specific contribution as opposed to the team, but in baseball that's much easier, because of the one-on-one nature of the pitcher and batter matchup... this makes baseball statistics a very detailed and popular business. And that's not even getting in to switching players (remember, in baseball, once someone leaves the field they are gone for the duration of the game. No "returning" them later allowed.), and the complexities of when to change pitchers or go to a reliever or a different reliever... as people like managers who don't pull a pitcher, only to have them fold (and thus have everyone blame the manager) learn to their sorrow. :)

3. Duration -- a baseball season is 162 games. That's a long time, and a lot of games... baseball's not just a once-a-week thing where one mistake can doom your whole season. Six game losing streak? Oh well, you'll probably do better next week... it's a very different (and I of course would say better) tone. I mean, how much does it really mean when you just play sixteen games... that throws in a much larger luck factor than you have in baseball. Not good.