WE'RE not sure this will really work, but let's give it a try anyway...
Many of you are familiar with Forman et soeur's Immaculate Grid, a game of baseball memory that's been doing a good job of keeping a certain class of deadbeat occupado and off the streets for nearly a year now.
We were just noodling around one evening with the IG model and looking for something that might make for an intriguing variant to it. And then it struck us: baseball records, as a stack of raw numbers, are quite often attached to "round numbers"--you know, data that ends with one, two, or three zeroes at the end of it:
For example--3000 hits, 500 HRs, 100 RBI, and so on.
So we thought a game where the round numbers dictated the answers might make for an intriguing new twist on the Immaculate Grid.
BUT before we work through some of the ways the game might actually be structured, it's probably a good idea to display a chart that will help you visualize the data:
So we are looking at lifetime home runs using round number "anchors"--200, 300, 400...all the way up to 700. Te idea is to fill in the player who has the closest possible number to the round number "anchor." For homers, these names represent the best answers.
BUT it's likely that few folks will know all of the closest possible numbers off the top of their head. (The idea here is not to look up the answers before playing, but to use your memory of the category to come up with the best possible answer "off the top of your head."
We've also shown the exact matches--players whose careers actually ended on a round number of homers--in the column shaded in green at the right.
The game is scored by the lowest possible difference in between the chosen player on either side of the round number. So we total this up and we have a differential of 17 at the 700 homer level, followed by a differential of 23 at six hundred; then 11 (4+7) at the 500 level. Things get tighter at four hundred, which has a differential of just three. And of course 300 and 200 actually have exact matches, so they don't add anything more to the best possible differential.
Adding those differentials up, you get 17+23+11+3=54 as the best possible score. (As you can see, the lower the score, the better!)
STILL with us on this? The interface would allow you to enter a name, and it could even give you three names to choose from (without revealing the actual homer total of anyone until you pick one of them).
After you've made your choices for all the round number "anchors," the game would sum up your differential and compare it to the best possible score.
JUST to get the idea across more strongly, let's take a look at another such chart--this one is for lifetime doubles:
For this variation, you've got a situation where the top round number anchor has no corresponding player on the the "plus" side. There are several ways that this could be handled in the scoring, but one way would be to penalize the total score by adding 50 points to the score whenever you provide an "answer" where none exists.
Let's figure out the best possible score here, to help you get the hang of it. Best differential at 800 is 8 (Tris Speaker's mind-bending total of 792 lifetime doubles). Then you have 24+14=38 at 700. Things get tighter starting at six hundred (the cumulative differential is just 5). And from 500 down to 300 you have an exact match possibility, so the "best possible" differential for doubles is: 8+38+5=51.
SO there you have it. There can be a lot of variations for the scoring mechanism: for example, the round number anchor could be 25, 50, 75--thus, 225, 325, 425, 525, etc. for this category. There should be enough different counting stats available for use to keep the game fresh.
The actual data points are intrinsically interesting even if they have no actual analytical value. (Which, of course, is also the case for IG--these are just meant for mind-twisting as we await the end of the world™.) We're going to compile charts like the ones above for a range of lifetime stats, and display more of them as the 2024 baseball season progresses. Stay tuned...
