Thursday, May 19, 2016

ANOTHER LOOK AT "BAD COMPLETE GAMES"

We'll stick with CGs for a bit, since we've been swamped of late with non-baseball stuff.

Let's take another look at "bad complete games," which are another item on the verge of extinction (as the table at right indicates.)

We've broken this out a bit differently than the last time we looked at this--here we define a "bad CG" as one where the pitcher allows five runs or more (with no need for those runs to be earned runs, as was the case previously.)

As you can see, occurrences have dwindled, reaching a permanent single-figure status in 2001 and moving onto "countable on the fingers of one hand" in 2003. This might be the year where we don't see any of them at all.

The other table (over at the left) shows the data by decade, with WPCTs (which, as you'd expect, have also trended downward, with a sharp drop for "bad CGs" since 1990.