Some folks at the Wall Street Journal figured out the average amount of action in a baseball game to be about 18 minutes, but using the same methods they found that for football it’s 11 minutes. Which goes to show that it’s not so much about the “action” as how you fill in the time when there’s “no action.” IMO baseball announcers tend to allow for more time where the announcer just isn’t saying anything, which probably gives the impression that there’s less action. My theory is that this has a lot to do with the season of the games. For many, the point of going to a baseball ball game is just as much to get out and enjoy nice weather as it is to watch the game. A football game, on the other hand, which can happen in bitterly cold winter weather, offers that much less. I also feel that football announcers tend more to talk just for the sake of it to fill in dead time. As a result, they end up saying a lot of inanities, or just obvious stuff, but they’re skilled at making it sound like some kind of wise observation. The baseball announcers, on the other hand, will throw out statistics just for the sake of it, which inevitably makes the broadcast sound less dynamic.
Baseball has a lot of action if you know what to look for. Each team’s chances of winning increase or decrease with every pitch.If you’re familiar with the game you get a feel for what it means when a batter has a 3 - 1 count versus, say, a 1 - 2 count. You know what it means when a batter fouls off pitch after pitch, or when the pitch count for a starting pitcher starts to approach 100. There’s a lot of little stuff to pay attention to. It may seem boring if you don’t know about all this stuff. That isn’t to say that all baseball games are equally interesting - a close game is usually a lot more interesting than a blowout.
There’s an understatement.
Unless the batter attempts a bunt. If it goes foul, Steerike Three! Yer Out!
In general, not any more. It becomes a suspended game and they attempt to resume the game at a later date. The only exception is if it is the last meeting between the two clubs in the regular season. In that case, it does become a tie game, and will be replayed in its entirety if it will affect playoff standings.
A tie can still happen but it’s a lot rarer than it used to be.
P.S. A tie game, while it has no effect on the standings, is still an official game played, and all stats count.
I’m looking forward to DKW’s input when someone asks to be taught all facets of threadshitting.
Forgive me if any of this is already obvious to you…
College baseball doesn’t have the same status as college football or college basketball. Professional baseball players might or might not have played at the college level, and as far as I can tell it largely depends on whether or not they wanted to go to college for other reasons than just to play ball. But all players who make it to the big leagues do so by “working their way up through the minors.” That is, when they sign with a professional baseball team, they start their careers in one of that organization’s minor league teams and work their way up to the big leagues sooner, later, or never, depending on their level of ability, their maturity, and the needs of the organization.
The major leagues (MLB) are baseball’s equivalent to the NFL or the NBA. They’re comprised of two separate leagues—the National League and the American League—that play the same game under mostly the same rules, with one notable exception (the Designated Hitter; see also Why can’t pitchers hit?). Until relatively recently, the only time teams from different leagues would play against each other was the World Series, pitting the champion teams from the NL and the AL against each other, but nowadays each team’s schedule includes a limited number of “interleague” games.
Speaking of scheduling, the season lasts from roughly the beginning of April until the end of September, with postseason play running through October. Teams play a game almost every day, with a day off roughly every two weeks, and those games are grouped into series, where the team will play a few (most commonly three) games in a row against the same opponent. Part of what makes the game so challenging from the players’ and managers’ point of view is that they have to keep doing it day after day after day.
Which is where strategy comes into play: Do you rest your best hitter today and take the chance of losing to have him ready for the next series? When do you stagger your rotation to match the opposition and still maintain something resembling a “rotation?” Is it better to play the shortstop who can’t hit shit but is a maniac fielder over the hitter who is iffy as a fielder? Or injured?
Wheels inside of wheels.
Actually, he described many of the things I love about the game.
No kidding. Plus the fact that Kershaw, Greinke and Ryu are pretty good hitters in their own right, in addition to being lights-out pitchers.
DKW is just miffed because his hometown team is in Japan.
Most players, but not all. For example see Society for American Baseball Research’s They Never Played in the Minors (and played 10+ years in the majors). After that list was compiled Dave Winfield, for one, also qualified. Also Wikipedia’s List of baseball players who went directly to Major League Baseball, which includes some who later played in the minors.
Well, heck, it’s even more complicated than that, since in addition to deciding who’s going to play and who’s going to sit, the team must also decide what players will and will not be on the major league roster.
An MLB team employs well over one hundred professional baseball players at any one time, probably around 150-170 each, but right now the great majority of them are in the minor leagues. The levels of North American pro ball in order are:
Mejor League Baseball
AAA, or “Triple A” - the International League and Pacific Coast League
AA, “Double A”
A
Rookie League
All MLB teams have affiliates at AAA and AA and usually have two affiliates at A, plus a rookie league team.
The complications stem from a simple question; of all those ballplayers you have, which 25 should be on your major league team right now? Ideally it’d be “the best 25 I have” but there are a lot of roster trickery and contract issues. Players brought up begin accruing major league service time and so reach free agency sooner; they must be added to the active roster and cannot be removed without being exposed to the possibility of being picked off by other teams; you’ve got to deal with injuries; you may have to shuffle players in and out if your bullpen is really tired. Some players have “options,” meaning they can be demoted to the minors without penalty; some do not, and demoting them means they can leave. Moving players off and on the major league roster is subject to a bazillion rules meant to prevent unfair use of one’s minor league teams as de facto benches. You will usually have some players on the Disabled Lists, which adds to the fun of juggling who’s assigned to what.
So although a team nominally has 25 players on it until September 1 (they can then expand the roster) nobody uses just 25 players. My team, the Blue Jays, has already employed 48 players for at least one game so far this year, most of whom are still employed by the club. They are not at all unusual in his regard; the Dodgers have used 44 players, Texas has suited up 57 men, 42 players have worn Royals blue, and the Phillies have sent 47 guys out there.
Rick: Other than players “out of options”, usually 3, who can’t be optioned?
And the Mexican League. See for example http://www.milb.com/milb/standings. MLB.com’s ‘Options’ abound: Common term explained by Jonathan Mayo, 2011, has a useful summary of options. Also possibly useful is Greg Stanwood’s 2014 No, seriously, what exactly are ‘options’?, which includes an “MLB Option Year Flowchart”.
SABR’s page of links to Documents Agreements and settlements includes a link to the 2012-2016 Collective Bargaining Agreement (916k PDF), which includes optioning.
I also invite RickJay to elaborate. For openers, I propose: A player’s contract could specify no optioning. Or a non-consenting playing with 10+ major-league years including 5+ consecutive years with the same team could not be optioned (but could be for example released outright). Also, only 16 of the 40-player roster can be on option at any one time, per MLB Roster Rules Presented by Arizona Phil, but I have not yet found the source for that.
Not to hijack the thread, but the difference is that if a batter keeps hitting foul balls he is very unlikely to be caught out, whereas a cricket batsman is subject to being caught out wherever the ball lands (assuming a fielder is near enough to actually catch it). How many times will a baseball batter just touch the ball and be caught out by the catcher (is that even an out in baseball)? Whereas in cricket, a batsman just nicking the ball and being caught out by the wicketkeeper happens several times a game, on average.
I don’t understand cricket enough to be certain that I’m answering the right question, but still: with two strikes on the batter, a batter just nicking the ball (that would be called a foul tip) which is caught by the catcher would be the third strike, and an out.
Thanks - yes, that is the point I was unsure of. I’m no expert on baseball, but that must be many times rarer than it is in cricket. Interesting that it is only an out on strike three - in cricket it would be out at any time. Though of course cricket doesn’t have the concept of strikes - if the first ball you face hits the wicket (equivalent to baseball’s strike zone), you’re gone immediately, whether you swung and missed or not.
A pitch that the batter grazes and that goes directly into the catcher’s mitt is a foul tip. It’s always a strike regardless of the count. There’s no special rule for a foul tip that makes it an out when there are two strikes - it’s just a strikeout. It’s different from a foul fly in that, when there are fewer than two strikes, the batter isn’t out on a foul tip (he would be out on a caught fly ball).
The rules about foul tips avoid a lot of disagreements about whether the ball was tipped. It can be really hard to tell whether the batter tipped the pitch or missed it entirely. By assigning the same outcome in both cases, the rules make it unimportant whether the ball was hit or not.
Mitt or hand, after grazing the bat (Rule 2.00). Also of course, per 2.00, a legal pitch that “Touches the batter in flight in the strike zone” is a strike. And, in 6.05 (b),
So after going directly it does not have to stay completely within the mitt/hand. The MLB 2014 Official Rules are downloadable from here (492k PDF).
For the OP, if you aren’t already, watch the LLWS currently showing on ESPN (every game you can watch). They spend a LOT of the broadcast talking about the fundamentals of the game.
Should add: LLWS is Little League World Series…
Er, on what? There are so many roster rules I wouldn’t know which ones to randomly choose.
I guess one thing I could elaborate on would be the Disabled List. A team may place a player on the Disabled List is he is injured in order to allow them to call up another player to replace them.
There are two primary Disabled Lists, the 15-Day and 60-Day. If a player is placed on the 15-day disabled list he cannot play in the majors for 15 days, but his stay can be extended BEYOND 15 days; so a played placed on the 15-day list can’t come back in 13 days, but he could stay on the list for 30 days. A player can be placed on the 15-day DL retroactively to the last day he didn’t play. For instance, if Smith hurts his knee May 1 and the team just has him sit out May 2 and 3, and then on May 4 decides he’s hurt worse than they thought, they can place him on the DL effective May 2. No more than 10 days can be retroactive, I believe.
The 60-day disabled list is the same basic idea. The difference is that a player on the 60-day DL is removed from the team’s 40-man roster for his stay on the DL, so the team can add someone to the roster in his place (it is consequently usually used for players with injuries expected to last very long, usually longer than sixty days.) For the 15-day DL that doesn’t happen, and you need to go with 39 players. A player who is placed on the 60day DL after August 1 cannot return that season at all, even if his sixty days run out in October and his team is still playing in the playoffs.
A player can be moved from the 15-day DL to the 60-day but not vice-versa.
There is now also a short 7-day disabled list for concussions.
It should be noted a player must be legitimately ascertained to be injured to be placed on the DL; using it as a roster trick is subject to the potential of huge penalties.