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Baseball Statistics: Games
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Baseball’s scoring and statistical practices developed rapidly during the 20th century, and new statistics were introduced over the years as the game evolved. As relief pitching became more specialized and more vital to the game, baseball officially introduced the saves statistic in the late 1960s. Essentially, a reliever is credited with a save when he shuts down the other team at the end of a close game. An offensive statistic that has become more emphasized in recent years is on base percentage, which measures walks and being hit by a pitch in addition to hits. During the 1990s some baseball statisticians began to use a measurement known as OPS (on base plus slugging), which combines on base percentage and slugging percentage. As the game continues to change and evolve, new ways of tracking and comparing performance will no doubt keep pace.
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In recent years, and especially since Bill James self-published his first Baseball Abstract in 1977, there is an increased awareness that many of the traditional statistics used to evaluate baseball players are lacking. The problem is not that certain statistics are somehow "inaccurate," but rather what they measure is irrelevant. Thanks to the pioneering work of James and others, there are now some working mathematical models of the game and attendant stats to quantify the value of a player to his team.
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Baseball statistics for individual games are recorded in two main forms: the scorecard and the box score. Both formats note the events of a game, but at different levels of detail. A scorecard is used to record the game on a play-by-play, inning-by-inning basis, often using symbols and shorthand (see accompanying graphic, “Baseball Scorecard”). Events such as where the ball was hit, how a player was put out, and what player reached what base in a particular inning can be noted.
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By measuring the changes in the delicate balance between offense and defense, statistics ... reveal much of baseball's history on the playing field. Lengthening the pitching distance to 60 feet 6 inches (18.4 metres) in 1893 initially touched off an offensive barrage. But increasing the size of the plate in 1900, counting the first two foul balls as strikes (adopted by the National League in 1901 and American League in 1903), the increased use of the spitball (in which moisture is applied to the surface of a ball to affect its flight), the appearance of a cadre of bigger and stronger pitchers, and conservative managerial styles (called “scientific” or “inside” baseball) all contributed to a sharp fall in total runs and hits. The hitting drought continued until the 1920s; then the outlawing of the spitball, the use of more balls per game, and the free swinging of Ruth produced a new offensive onslaught. Some also attributed this explosion of hitting to the introduction of what they believed to be a livelier ball, despite denials from major league authorities and the balls' manufacturers. Offense continued to dominate the game until 1963, when baseball officials sought to speed up games by increasing the size of the strike zone called by the umpires.
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Sports journalist Schwarz brings to the fore this intelligent, smartly researched and often hilarious look at the use of statistics in baseball, which Schwarz definitively shows to "date back to the game's earliest days in the 19th century." It will delight any fan who memorizes the numbers on the back of trading cards or pores over newspaper box scores. The book's success is rooted in its focus on the people "obsessed with baseball's statistics ever since the box score started it all in 1845," rather than being about the statistics themselves. The reader is presented with enthusiastic but unvarnished looks at such key figures as Henry Chadwick, whose love for numbers led to his inventing the box score grid that remains, Schwarz shows, "virtually unchanged to this day"; Allan Roth, the numbers man hired by the Brooklyn Dodgers who was as important to the team's success as its famed GM Branch Rickey; and the all-but-forgotten work of George Lindsey, one of the first people to apply statistical analysis to weigh various baseball strategies. Delivered in a delightfully breezy and confident style, this volume ... serves as an excellent alternate or parallel history of the sport, as we see how the statistics influenced the game itself—such as the banning of the spitball—as much as they were used to detail individual games.
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Since statistics, numerical facts and data is the lifeblood of baseball, all the teams and both leagues maintain their own statistical records. MLB-teams have all the information on statistics on each team in the Major League. General managers and baseball surveyors study player statistics to decide what players to try to get for their team, and managers, catchers, pitchers ... study statistics of batters on opposing teams to find out how best to pitch to them and position the players. Hence, managers always base their personnel decisions during the game on statistics, such as choosing who to put in the lineup or which relief pitcher to bring in. Also important are more specific statistics for a certain situation. For instance, a certain hitter's ability to hit left-handed pitchers may lead to his manager giving him more chances to face lefties. Some hitters hit better with runners in scoring position, an opposing team manager might elect to internationally walk him in order to face a less competitor hitter.
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