“One of these days in your travels a guy is going to come up to you and show you a nice brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken, and this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spades jump out of the deck and squirt cider in you ear. But son, do not bet this man, for sure as you stand there, you are going to wind up with an earful of cider.”
— Damon Runyon
That quote was in a little book I had as a teenager (and still have), called Never Give A Sucker An Even Break. Now, this challenge isn’t a sucker bet at all — in fact, I suspect most of you smart cookies will nail it — but I just couldn’t wait any longer to drop that line. Anyway, here’s the challenge:
- Choose one team offensive counting stat that appears in a standard box score (excluding Runs and RBI).
- The goal is to pick the stat which best predicts the winner in all 2013 MLB contests through Thursday 5/30, when one team had more of that stat than its opponent. When the team with more of the stat wins, that’s a win for the stat.
- All games in which the foes had the same total in the chosen stat are kicked out of the pool.
To avoid any doubt which box scores are standard, we’ll limit the choices to:
- Plate Appearances
- At-Bats
- Hits
- Doubles
- Triples
- Home Runs
- Walks (including intentional)
- Strikeouts
- Hit By Pitch
- Sacrifice Hits
- Sacrifice Flies
- Stolen Bases
- Grounded into Double Plays
I have the 2013 winning percentages based on each of these stats, through May 30, via the Play Index and some Excel legwork. There’s a clear leader among these stats, by a margin equivalent to 5 wins per 162 games.
I’m not implying any meaning to the results. It’s just a game. I’ll show the percentages Tuesday, or whenever a sufficient number of suckers — er, deep thinkers — have made a guess. And let me know if you’d like the W% for any basic stat not listed here; if it’s part of a standard Team Game search in both batting and pitching, I can whip it up pretty quickly.
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AND THE ANSWER IS…
- “It’s gotta be hits.”
Below are the winning percentages for 2013 MLB games, through May 30, when a team had more of a given stat than its opponent. As a matter of interest, I’ve included in this table 3 stats that were not available choices in our game, which are shown in brackets: [Intentional walks], [Hits minus HRs], and [Unintentional walks].
[table id=127 /]
I was surprised that [Hits minus HRs] is so potent.
I did this little project because of a habit I started a couple of years ago. On the heels of some debate on the value of walks, I made it a part of my box score routine to tally in my head the daily record of the teams that draw more walks than their opponents. I never kept a running total, but I noticed that they almost never had a losing day. It took a while to figure out how I could assemble this information from the Play Index for a larger period of time.
Thanks to everyone for participating, and don’t let this be the end of the discussion!
(And P.S. to koma: What method did you use?)
