Posts Tagged ‘statistics’

So when I started to create this game after testing the waters on the greatest fan site ever Athletics Nation I turned my attention towards the user interface. That is pretty much designed and locked in now and we will reveal it once we get closer to beta. My next quest was to figure out how the scoring would go. This required me to find some statistical information about Baseball in general. This sounds like it would be a very easy task, since Baseball at times seems to be all about stats and not much else, well other than steroids of course. There are guys who can tell you with a fair amount of certainty where someone is going to hit the ball and how you should adjust your fielders accordingly for example. With the rise of such stats as on base percentage and the decline of oh say batting average; the world of traditional Baseball statistics has really been dumped on it’s head.

So with this dumping, I figured it would be relatively easily to find comprehensive statistics on entire game stats, such as how many hits are there per game on average, how many doubles, strike outs, etc etc. I spent a little bit searching around on the web for some of this information and I could only find individual or team statistics. Nothing that represented the entire game. So I took it upon myself to come up with some of these statistics myself.

What I did was take a random sample of games from the 2007 season and add up all of the outcomes that I could think of for an at bat. The totals weren’t all that shocking I guess for the average Baseball fan, but interesting nonetheless.

As you can see batters get out a lot in Baseball. Some of the shocking things to me was that I figured there were more triples. It shows up as 0% of the time but it was actually .41% of the time and I was far to lazy to make excel do what I wanted it to do. I am not saying I thought that triples happened a lot of the time but I just figured it would have been more than .41%. How does this relate to the game I am building. Simple. These statistics will be the basis on which scores will be given for correct predictions. You should all be glad that I didn’t just wing it because I would have under valued triples by thinking that they happened more frequently then they did.

I kicked around the idea of having the scoring be adaptive and I still might implement it this way. What this would mean is that you would get a bonus during the game for basically picking the FIRST double play, or the first home run that was hit and then as it was more common through the game it would lose it’s luster. I still may do something with that later on but it was too much to wrap my feeble brain around at this time.