Friday, April 26, 2013

HOW IS THAT 2 2B/G VS. 2 3B/G THING WORKING OUT?

Quickly, because we are swamped with the impending arrival of a huge collection of what eBay has so kindly taken to calling "entertainment memorabilia," we revisit our recent point of ideological urgency: the ratio between the number of games where players hit two or more doubles, and the number of games in which they hit two or more triples.

Last night (4/25) Domonic Brown had a couple of doubles for the Phils in a game they lost to the Pirates, 6-4. That made the 76th instance of 2+ 2B in a game this year, which is working out to just about three a day. That pace would result in around 540-550 such games over the season. (There were 557 such games in 2012).

Elvis has left the building...and is headed toward third.
As for triples, we had a second 2-3B game on April 1st (Elvis Andrus), but we haven't had one since.

So that ratio, while not 80:1 (something that apparently unfolds over what the philosophes like to call "the ripeness of time"), it's about 38:1 at the moment.

Remember that we had 7 such 2-3B games in 2012. That's about one a month, as opposed to three a day.

We need to do something about that ratio. As we told you, back in 1920 it was 4:1. We looked at the Play Index (thanks, as always, to Forman et fil for that marvelous tool...) and found that there are fourteen instances so far this year where players had at least one double and one triple in a game. If half of those games were somehow able add a second 3B, the ratio would drop to about 5:1.

The 190-foot line and the inning of the imposed shift would also affect this ratio, though it's hard to say how many more two-triple games it would create.

Remember: watching guys run the bases is a lot more exciting than watching them trot around the bases.