{"id":10564,"date":"2007-07-16T16:58:46","date_gmt":"2007-07-16T20:58:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2007\/07\/16\/10564.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:56:54","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:56:54","slug":"101518684-if-you-want-to-know","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2007\/07\/16\/101518684-if-you-want-to-know\/","title":{"rendered":"10,151-8,684, if you want to know"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

So. The Philadelphia Phillies lost their 10,000th game<\/a>. It was bound to happen eventually. Gentle Readers may not be aware that baseball fans, when they talk about a pitcher with a great many losses on his record, will say that you have to be awfully good to lose that many games. And it’s true; a pitcher who isn’t awfully good won’t get a chance to lose fifty games in his career. Sadly, this does not apply to teams. Despite an astonishing display of awfulness from, say, 1918-1948, during which they only broke .500 in their 1932 78-76 fourth-place triumph and only broke .450 one other time and only finished as high as fifth<\/I> in the standings three times, they continued to play major-league baseball, or at least to play against major-league baseball clubs. And eventually they recovered somewhat. They’ve still won more games than the Red Sox.\n

I’ve occasionally suggested that I would enjoy a relegation system for baseball where the bottom team or two in MLB every year (or every five years, or something) would be sent down to the minors, to be replaced by the top team or two from the minors. This set-up would make life interesting for bad teams in August and September. The problem is that it would utterly destroy the farm system. Speaking as a Giants fan, that would be ... well, I think I would enjoy a relegation system. But it’s not what we have, and I suppose it’s a good thing for the Phillies.\n

Just to point this out: if you played a hundred and fifty games a year for a hundred years, and you lost two-thirds<\/I> of those games, that would be ten thousand losses. NBA and NHL teams play 82 games a year, NFL teams play 16. Premier League FA teams play 38 games a year. I think rugby Super League teams play 32 games. Major League Baseball teams play 162 games a year, mostly playing six days a week for six months. County and college teams have been playing cricket for a long time, but I suspect ten losses a year is a lot for a cricket side. Of course, in baseball there are no draws.\n

But my point about this is just that baseball teams play twice as many games a year as any other sport. There are a lot of things about the play of the game that evolved the way they did because it’s an everyday game. The rosters and the way pitchers are used, for instance. You could imagine a version of baseball where they only played one game a week, and each team was allowed only, say, eleven men on a roster, with an ace pitcher, like a quarterback, playing almost all of almost every game. Or a version played three games a week that used a game clock in some way, forcing much faster play. Or perhaps rougher play, never developing the rule that you can’t get a player out by throwing the ball at him. Maybe the amazing fielding we take for granted wouldn’t have developed; the worst-fielding team in the league last year made fewer than one error a game and converted 97.8% of chances, where a hundred years before, the best-fielding team made an error and a quarter a game and converted only 97% of chances, and in 1884 the Phillies (before they were called the Phillies—Kill, Quakers, Kill!) committed four and three-quarters errors a game, converting only eight of every nine chances. If they played once a week, maybe they wouldn’t have started wearing gloves.\n

It didn’t happen like that. In 1884 the Philadelphia team played one hundred and twelve games, losing 73. In 1907, they played one hundred and forty-seven games, losing only 64 (and coming in third!). In 1947, they played one hundred and fifty-four games, losing ninety-two (and tied with the Pirates). From 1975 to 1984 they went 862-693; my Giants in those years went 752-815. Base Ball became baseball, with closers and the rabbit ball and pinch-runners and gloves and the first two foul balls counting as strikes and the designated hitter and no spitballs and the rosin bag and lights and balks and the batter can’t call for a high pitch anymore, either. Ten thousand losses. You gotta admire that. Not so much the Phillies, although the truth is that they are more fun to watch than the Giants this year, but the league, and the country, and humanity in general. Ten thousand losses, and you know I’ll be rooting for them tonight.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So. The Philadelphia Phillies lost their 10,000th game. It was bound to happen eventually. Gentle Readers may not be aware that baseball fans, when they talk about a pitcher with a great many losses on his record, will say that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[193],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-baseball"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10564"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10564\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18064,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10564\/revisions\/18064"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}