So, as mentioned on
episode 61 of the BBA today, I collected some data on how many players achieved certain milestones in MLB. I've suspected for awhile in the BBA we hit homer runs at a much higher rate than real life. The point was to compare that to the numbers collected by
Mike Simon's viz on milestones, and see if the traditional MLB milestones can be applied to the BBA. I basically counted the MLB milestones as happening over 100 years of MLB history. That's not entirely accurate, but pre 1920's baseball is so different that I didn't want to give the HR count too big of a handicap when compared to the BBA. MLB has two significant periods of massively depressed offense. The old deadball era of the late 1800's and early 1900's and the higher mound era in the 60's Shortening up the the time period I use for MLB basically allows me to not worry about so many years played in really low offensive environments that we'll never match. It does mess with the pitching totals in a way, but as we'll see, that doesn't really matter as much.
I considered Simon's totals as covering 60 years of history, as the earliest players feats in his sample seem to have been achieved in 1985. Again, It's possible I should have gone shorter, and said 50 years, but I wanted to make up to some degree for an issue I'll cover in the next paragraph.
So, with those rough outlines, we should have player hitting milestone totals that are about 60% of the MLB totals. (60 years/100 years)
The big takeaways are that HR are hit at a much higher rate in the BBA than MLB, and that pitching milestones really don't match up much.
Here's the data:
Offense:
| HR | MLB | BBA | 60% | Ratio |
|---|
| 300 | 133 | 151 | 80 | 1.8875 |
| 400 | 55 | 76 | 33 | 2.30303 |
| 500 | 27 | 23 | 16 | 1.4375 |
| 600 | 7 | 7 | 4 | 1.75 |
| 700 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 2 |
When we look at the above home run data, we see that In the BBA we hit homers at a significantly higher rate than MLB. There are two reasons for it. First, the entirely of BBA history has been played in a more "modern" MLB environment, where there are more homers. In real life, they are at some point in the next 15 or so seasons going to have to start to look at their own milestones, because they will have far more 300, 400, and 500 homer guys than they used to. We're just "ahead" of them, because we've been doing this for 70 years and they only have for 25-30 in a higher homer era. Secondly, we also do tend to have more 50 and 60 homer seasons, and more homers being hit by middle infielders, center fielders, catchers, etc. We just hit for more homer power than real life, period. The last column, labeled "ratio" compares our total to the projected 60% total. We accrue 300 homer hitters at nearly twice the rate of MLB. We accrue 400 home run hitters at more than twice the rate. That's really pretty nuts. 400 homers in the BBA just isn't that rare, comparatively. It starts to get more reasonable around 500, but almost 1.5 times the rate of real life indicates that 500 isn't as nearly as rare for us as the "real life" threshold we are used to. We really need to start thinking of our "automatic Hall of Fame number" for homers to be in the 550-575 range. 500 is simply too low and too common.
| RBI | MLB | BBA | 60% | Ratio |
|---|
| 1000 | 279 | 176 | 167 | 1.053892 |
| 1500 | 53 | 33 | 32 | 1.03125 |
| 2000 | 4 | 4 | 2 | 2 |
| 2500 | 0 | 3 | 0 | - |
| Hits | MLB | BBA | 60% | Ratio |
|---|
| 2000 | 289 | 170 | 173 | 0.982659 |
| 2500 | 98 | 60 | 59 | 1.016949 |
| 3000 | 32 | 19 | 19 | 1 |
| 3500 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 1.333333 |
These next two tables are kind of a sanity check, and show that the HR argument is valid. Adjusted to us playing 60 of an adjusted 100 similar MLB seasons, our number of milestones for RBI and hits are right on line. The outlier is the number of guys with 2000 and 2500 RBI, but that is entirely explained by our doubling the rate of MLB for guys with 600 and 700 homers. Otherwise, this looks good. 3000 hits is still 3000 hits. RBI mean roughly the same in the BBA as they do in MLB.
Pitching:
Okay, so pitching is a mess. Baseball is kind of amazing. How we pitch to batters has massively changed over the last century. Shorter outings, more arms, more specialization make any matchup of numbers pretty gross.
| Wins | MLB | BBA | 60% | Ratio |
|---|
| 200 | 118 | 35 | 71 | 0.492958 |
| 250 | 48 | 6 | 29 | 0.206897 |
It is not at all surprising that MLB is outpacing us massively on 200 game winners. We never had a time when pitchers make 40+ starts routinely. However, this also means that we might want to start seeing our 250 game winners as jsut as rare as MLB 300 game winners. Maybe. That might be too big of a stretch.
| Saves | MLB | BBA | 60% | Ratio |
|---|
| 300 | 30 | 35 | 18 | 1.944444 |
| 400 | 4 | 20 | 2 | 10 |
| 500 | 2 | 4 | 1 | 4 |
| 600 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| 700 | 0 | 1 | 0 | - |
Saves are the opposite problem. MLB played about 35-40 seasons where teams used their best reliever as a specialized save earner. We've played 70 that way. So being 2-1 for 300 saves makes sense. Our number of guys with 400, 500, 600, and 700 saves shows even more how susceptible we've been to the idea of using a "proven closer". We also have considerably less variability in reliever performance that real life baseball.
| K | MLB | BBA | 60% | Ratio |
|---|
| 2000 | 83 | 135 | 50 | 2.7 |
| 2500 | 39 | 77 | 23 | 3.347826 |
| 3000 | 18 | 24 | 11 | 2.181818 |
| 3500 | 9 | 9 | 5 | 1.8 |
| 4000 | 4 | 1 | 2 | 0.5 |
And of course strikeouts are way way way up for us. We've played our entire history in the relatively high strikeout environment of modern baseball, and like home runs, we are a high strikeout league, and have been for a long time. Our stuff ratings has been the highest of our pitcher ratings as long as I've known the BBA. Selfish plug alert, this makes Ricardo Diaz being the only BBA guy with 4000 K's (non Steve Nebraska division) even more remarkable. My supposition is that we blow away the lower total K milestones because all of our pitchers strike everyone out, but we fall start to tail off because compared to MLB history, many of our top pitchers have shorter careers in terms of innings pitched.
So that's that. The big place where we need to adjust our thinking is home runs. The other thing we could start thinking about is treating 175 or so wins as like real life 200, if pitcher wins are something you care about.
