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Here's one that occurs to me. In baseball, you will lose 1/3 of your games no matter how good you are, and you will win 1/3 no matter how bad you are.
In the past eight years, every team in Major League Baseball was, 60 games into the season, between .333 and .666, with only four exceptions, all four below .333, spread out over four different teams. That's four teams out of 240 that defied the above adage. Without any salary impositions.
For comparison, Currently, in the National Basketball Association, ten of the 30 team are above .666 or below .333, at a point 60 games into the season. (Which is why I chose 60 games into the season to make the comparison.)
Spread out over a whole season, an average of only one team per season even wins 3/5 of their games (ten in the last ten years over .600.)
The NBA has fewer teams, different scheduling algorithms, and a shorter season. I am not saying the numbers are not a little interesting, but it a completely arbitrary comparison with no real life use.
The NBA has fewer teams, different scheduling algorithms, and a shorter season. I am not saying the numbers are not a little interesting, but it a completely arbitrary comparison with no real life use.
The NBA has exactly the same number of teams (30) and I adjusted to first 60 games to account for length of season amd equalize the critera. In both leagues, scheduling algorithms change frequently. It's even worse in college basketball, where at this moment, 25% of 330 conference teams have in-conference records above .667. That does not count the non-conference blowouts and mismatches in the early season, but only games against opponents of presumably equal stature..
The NBA has exactly the same number of teams (30) and I adjusted to first 60 games to account for length of season amd equalize the critera. In both leagues, scheduling algorithms change frequently. It's even worse in college basketball, where at this moment, 25% of 330 conference teams have in-conference records above .667. That does not count the non-conference blowouts and mismatches in the early season, but only games against opponents of presumably equal stature..
That's nice..........it is still a silly comparison made sillier bringing in college basketball.
The comparison is a bit weak. In the NBA you have one conference that has been much stronger than the other for a few years now(western) and that means teams like Miami and Indiana will have an easier path to a .666 percentage because you play your own conference more.
For me it has always been the numbers. When I was a kid someone gave me a pack of Hall of Fame baseball cards with the career stats on the back, and I was enchanted. Before I ever saw a ML game, I was alreasy immersed in the history of the game and could tell you what Arky Vaughan hit in 1935 (.385) or how many home runs Mel Ott hit in 1929 (42) and so forth.
Then just as I was first starting to watch the games and follow the races, the Mantle/Maris assault on Ruth came along and I was transfixed by that. Two years later Sandy Koufax had his first big season and two years after that he set the modern single season K record with 382 (since passed by Nolan Ryan with 383) and that same year Willie Mays hit 51 home runs, his second career 50 plus season which put him in what was then rare company (Ruth, Foxx, Mantle and Kiner only other multiple 50 homer seasons).
You get the idea, the numbers told the story. You could look at a players career stats and they could tell you a a lot about a player without ever having seen the fellow play. You see Dick Stuart's hitting stats alongside Luis Aparicio's hitting stats and you knew which guy was bigger, which guy was faster, which one played first base and which one held down one of the skill positions.
I loved seeing challenges to the records.
It was because of this that I have so much contempt for the PEDs generation. The greatest and longest lasting damage that they have done to the game is making the record book tainted and unreliable.
No time limit. So no prevent defense or playing for a field goal. No intentional fouling. No shoot-offs. You just keep playing the exact same game for however long it takes.
Now, that can get absurd if you're watching a four-hour nine-inning Yankee/Red Sox game, but otherwise, it's a great game to watch and analyze. As noted above, the numbers also mean more in baseball than other sports so it's more fun to discuss and speculate.
Jerry Seinfeld was on Mike and Mike (Formerly known as Mike and Mike in the Morning) a month or so ago and baseball came up as a topic and Jerry was asked why he loves baseball and he had a very interesting answer.
Jerry said that in football, you can watch a play and see the end result, but not really know how the the players got from Point A to Point B, but with baseball, you don't need to be an expert to know what happened and that its pretty self explanatory.
Now, whether or not that makes Baseball "the best" is open for debate obviously, but its certainly an interesting perspective.
It's not yet another variant of "put the ball in the hole or across the line".
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