Before this thread I would have said “Away vs Home” is the standard format in all American sports, but googling now it does look like MLS lists them in opposite order when naming a game. Weird.
I wasn’t, I thought wins were pretty easy.
I didn’t know that was the case. I thought a win was given to a pitcher if the team won and you were the most recent pitcher when your team had the most recent maintained lead.
And conversely, you were assigned a loss if your team lost and you were the pitcher who gave up the run(s) that gave away the most recent maintained lead to the other team. Anything else is a “no decision” for a pitcher.
I didn’t think there were other situations determining when to give a loss or win.
I think it’s fair most of the time. Generally the pitcher is the most important player to prevent the other team from scoring, and no other position has a greater impact on a team’s win. But you can have a situation where a pitcher does his job but fielding errors lead to points.
Right. It’s the pitcher for the winning team who was in the game when they assumed a lead that they did not relinquish. But even at that, the starting pitcher is not eligible for the win unless he pitches at least five innings. And no, it’s not quite that simple, but that’s the way the rule would apply in most cases.
What messes me up is the balk rule. I get the purpose of it. They want to get a better balance between giving base runners a chance to steal a base and giving the pitcher a chance to pick them off. Fine. But then they have this list of 5,458,257,395 little piddly-ass things the pitcher can’t do, or has to do in a certain way. I’m glad I don’t have to know all that stuff. If I’m watching a game and the umpire calls a balk, I can just understand it as the pitcher doing something he wasn’t supposed to do. Ooops. Be more careful, dude.
And you can have a situation where the pitcher holds the opposing team to just one or two runs, but someone left the team’s bats in the freezer overnight.
Official scorers are paid by the league, not by the home team. There’s an MLB scorers’ committee that has the power to overturn decisions.
It used to be commonplace for local reporters to be hired as official scorers, but their papers/organizations started forbidding them to work as scorers years ago due to perceived conflicts of interest (supposedly a scorer might be loath to make a decision that offends a player if he thinks the player will be pissed off and not talk to him) There have been controversial scorer’s decisions over the years that were thought to be biased toward the home team but that’s thought to be less of a problem these days.
Here’s an interview with a long-time Red Sox official scorer that’s kind of interesting. He mentions a long-ago incident where a Red Sox GM got ticked at the scorer for ruling a base hit in a situation where the Red Sox pitcher had a no-hitter going, and allegedly made sure the scorer didn’t work any more games.
Nope. The rule is that in the reliever who was deemed to be the most effective gets credit for the win, and in some cases that’s not the last reliever to pitch before gaining a lead.
Yeah, it definitely is. But pitching wins are still really dumb - wins (and losses) are a team statistic, and giving it to one player (even the most important) is silly. At the very least, it’s been conflated to be an important stat, when it’s not (or shouldn’t be). There are far more stats to indicate a pitcher’s effectiveness.
That’s pretty stupid then.
I would rule it a hit, even though either fielder could have made an easy play on the ball.
All soccer leagues around the world do this. If you’re watching a match from Europe, for example, the home team name/score is listed first on the graphic.
Which is just the opposite of American baseball, basketball, football. The visiting team/score is listed first on the graphic.
Here’s a prime example. Starting pitcher gets pulled after four innings, and leaves with a 3-run lead. Relief pitcher #1 comes in to pitch the top of the fifth, but gives up 3 runs to tie the game. Home team then scores to take the lead. Relief pitcher #2 comes in in the top of the sixth and finishes the game, allowing no more runs. Technically, relief pitcher #1 would be the pitcher of record when the go-ahead run scored, but the scorer could (and probably would) award the win to #2, because he was far more effective than #1.
That’s just one of the reasons why Win/Loss isn’t really followed as a meaningful statistic when analyzing pitchers.
There is a fascinating article here 56* about the scorer’s influence on DiMaggio’s 56 game hitting streak in 1941.
Reporters who covered the majors back then were not, by today’s measure, real journalists. They were almost like, employees of the teams they covered. As DiMaggio biographer Richard Ben Cramer describes it, “Baseball writers had status, visibility, more freedom than any other reporter, more travel, more good times, and more money… they dined out on friendships with the heroes of the age… and every bit of it [was] on the cuff.” If a player didn’t like you, you’d simply be denied all access to the team. Cramer continues: “The quickest way to lose it all was to run afoul of the fellows in the business—not the newspaper business, but the baseball business.” A writer’s job was to keep the baseball people happy.
In keeping with the ethics of the era, Dan Daniel, a popular writer who had been covering baseball since 1909, enjoyed all the perks of covering the Yankees. He travelled with and befriended the players, and had his expenses paid for by the club itself. Daniel was, by modern standards, part of the team, as much a PR man as a reporter. He wrote of DiMaggio extensively, championing “The Big Dago” before DiMaggio had even appeared in the bigs, and it was he who authored the quote, “Here is the replacement for Babe Ruth.” The Clipper made for wonderful copy: he was a good-looking bachelor who patrolled the most revered position in all of sports, centre field for the New York Yankees.
Daniel also happened to be the most important witness to the streak. The reason? This friend of DiMaggio and quasi-employee of the New York Yankees just happened, unbelievably, to be the Yankees’ official home-game scorer as well—the very arbiter of hits and errors. For games at Yankee Stadium, Daniel, and Daniel alone, decided if DiMaggio was to be credited with a hit.
I’d say the convention is to list Away at Home so it’s not ambiguous. If the at isn’t there, and all but one sport uses Away vs Home it’s reasonable to assume that’s the convention, and the one sport doing it differently is just looking for attention.
Even if the scorekeeper is biased, in what direction do their incentives run? They don’t have any say in who wins or loses the game: That’s up to the umps. If they’re biased in favor of the team, will that lead them to give them more favorable stats? Maybe not, if they’re paid by the owners, and the contract with the players depends on the players’ stats.
That one sport has been doing it forever, and is the most popular sport in the world. Doubtful if it’s done to look for attention.
You don’t understand. To the true fan the game is not as important as the statistics it generates and its the scorekeeper who determines the minutia so dear to their hearts.
Some players take this stuff fairly seriously, and having hits taken away by calling a play an error is a big deal to them. Obviously, with contract incentives there might be some monetary gain as well. But as mentioned above about Joe DiMaggio’s 56 game hitting streak, owners may want streaks like that kept alive because it puts butts in seats and eyeballs on TVs.
Thanks all for the replies, and all the food for thought!
Can we now talk about how assists in Basketball and Hockey are adjudicated? Sometimes when I watch the highlights, I might just watch an individual players game highlights (20pts 10 assists etc), and see him throw a harmless pass to another player, who takes a dribble, a spin, a step-back and makes the shot - and the player who passed it to him gets an assist?
In my opinion, an assist should only be awarded when a player makes a pass (or performs some action) where his teammate who receives the ball (or puck) has a better-than-average chance of scoring.
In basketball, there is a bit of a judgement call as to whether a player gets an assist depending on what the player who scores does. In hockey, it’s simply the last one or two teammates who touched the puck if no opposing player touches the puck in between.
I used to work the scoreboard when we had a AAA team here and got to chat many times with the official scorer. He said errors came down to “ordinary effort”. In your example, the outfielder never touched the ball, never got close to the ball. You can’t give him an error, you can’t even be sure he would have caught the ball if he didn’t lose it in the sun.
The official scorer was not biased in this case, simply doing his job correctly.
That Zobrist hit in 2015, while it should have been caught by a fielder, most likely by Bautista, was correctly called a hit and not an error. The official scorer cannot predict that he would have indeed catch it so can’t score it an error.
On the other hand, I recall a play a few years ago where the outfielder (Mookie?) ran a long way just to get to the ball but it hit the end of his glove and he didn’t make the catch. The scorer charged him with an error when most people disagreed as it was extraordinary effort. In this case, it was subjective and errors are the only stat I can think of where that’s the case. All other stats are objective. Saves are objective; there’s a clear definition of what constitute a save and a scorer cannot subjectively assign a save to a pitcher. Same for wins and losses.
True for saves. For wins, it’s nearly always true, but there are two corner cases in which the determination of the winning pitcher is subject to the scorer’s judgment.
- If the starter didn’t pitch five full innings, the MLB rule states that “the official scorer awards the win to the most effective relief pitcher.”
- If a reliever would normally be in line for the win (because he was the pitcher of record when his team took the lead for good), but his performance is deemed to have been “brief and ineffective,” (e.g., he gave up the lead, but finished the inning, and his team then re-took the lead), then the scorer can choose to award the win to a subsequent reliever of their choice.
Re: Wins.
Look at today’s Dodger/Giant game.
Kershaw pitched through the end of the 4th for the Dodgers and left with a 4-2 lead. He can’t get the win because he didn’t pitch five innings.
Bickford pitched the 5th for the Dodgers and gave up one hit and one walk but no one scored.
Martin pitched the 6th for the Dodgers and didn’t give up any hits or walks. Martin got the W.
It was 5-2 in the bottom of the 9th. Kimbrel pitched the entire 9th and gave up one earned run but finished the inning so the Dodgers won 5-3.
Why didn’t Bickford get the win? Martin pitched better but Bickford didn’t give up any runs. Scorer’s discretion but it wasn’t like Bickford stunk the place up.