Mark Astolfi

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  • Mark Astolfi
    Participant
    Or baseball is just changing to the point where it isn’t really baseball any more. Used to be fans loved to argue forever over niggling little rule details. Today, they can’t even sit through 10 innings. But it was a great run while it lasted.
    Mark Astolfi
    Participant
    OK, I found it, it is the rule. And actually, if the official scorer thinks the try at the other runner was because there was no play on the batter, and there is no out made, it is a hit.  I remember now first encountering this rule and thinking it made no sense. Haven’t changed my opinion. Does this happen very often? My impression is that it doesn’t, that failure to get an out on a fielder’s choice is usually an error.
    Mark Astolfi
    Participant
    You are correct in both cases…earned on the wild pitch, unearned on the passed ball. But I must point out, it doesn’t matter what you or I or anybody else thinks…them’s the rules.
    Mark Astolfi
    Participant
    So what kind of “adjustment” are we talking about? Suppose half a team’s games were played as doubleheaders. That means 81 games of 7 innings, 81 games of 9 innings. An average game would be 8 innings, so would ERA be ER per 8 innings? (OK, I know 81 doesn’t divide by 2, but you see my point.) Trouble is, that would only work if every team had games of the same average length.

    Instead, you could figure ERA as ER per 9 innings, but count an ER given up during a 7 inning game as 7/9ths of an ER. Either way, it’s completely unnecessary. After all, there is no “adjustment” if a game lasts 10 or 12 or 20 innings…or if it is shortened to 6  or 8 innings. And if ERA were per inning instead of per 9 innings, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion.

     

    Mark Astolfi
    Participant
    If A is out on C’s fielder’s choice, and B eventually scores to end the game, B’s run would be earned according to how I understand the current rule, since it would be C’s run that would be unearned in the place of A’s. 

    I say, and I believe you agree with me, that because B’s run is the first run scored, it ought to be unearned, since he would not have remained in the game except for the presence of A and A’s being put out by a field’s choice. The whole point of the rule is to credit a run scored because of the presence of A as unearned, since the DR was no “fault” of the pitcher’s. 

    Now the trouble with what I just said is that we don’t know for sure if, in the absence of A, B would have been put out on C’s fielder’s choice, or if C would have been put out instead. Reconstruction of the inning now isn’t so much what happened, but why it happened, and I don’t think you can assume that. So reconstruction in this case is imperfect and we must do the best we can. I don’t believe the current rule does the best it can. 

    Mark Astolfi
    Participant
    Wow, this is a roaring hot topic! Altho I see other posts that get zero comments, so what the heck. Maybe I just wasn’t saying it right…it is tricky. The point is, consider a situation where you are only going to make up as many games as are necessary to determine playoff status. And you don’t know whether it will take one game or two. If it would take one game, you’d play 9 innings…if two games, 7 innings. For how many innings do you schedule the first game?  And my answer was, since it’s possible you’d need two games, you schedule two games  for 7 innings each, then cancel the second game if it’s not necessary. Trouble with that reasoning is, the losing team could argue that since you only played one game, it should have gone on for two more innings, during which time of course they might have won.
    Mark Astolfi
    Participant
    First, you mean intra-division games, not intra-league. Second, for a sport that is so bound by the intricacies of its rules, it’s amazing that the exact language of this rule isn’t easily available on the net. Guess I’m not googling it correctly.

    But third, scoring rules state that for the purpose of consecutive game streaks, the completion of a suspended game is considered to have occurred on the date when the game began. This results in the odd situation where a batter can have a “hole” in his batting streak: say 20 games with a hit, then a suspended game without a hit, then 20 more games with a hit. Only when the suspended game is finally completed do we know is he has a streak of 41 games, or 2 streaks of 20.

    But since the tie-breaker you mention is the 20, 21, 22, etc. previous intra-division games, one has to assume that means consecutive games, and it would make sense for the scoring rule I mentioned to apply. But who can say for sure without seeing the exact wording, right?

     

    Mark Astolfi
    Participant
    Still, I don’t know how many people are aware that a high school ERA isn’t the same as a professional ERA, since it’s based on 7 innings, not 9. So if you gave up as many earned runs as innings pitched, in high school it would be 7.00, while in the pros it would be 9.00.
    Mark Astolfi
    Participant
    I’ve often wondered why ERA is figured based on 1 game (9 or 7 or whatever innings) versus 1 inning. I could understand if it were a stat that, taken to 3 decimal places, didn’t give very much information…like a stat that always came out like .001, .002, or even .0004 which would be rounded down to .000. But ERA is fine…3.75 per 9 innings comes out as .417 per inning…what’s wrong with that? Just like batting average, on base, slugging, etc. Games of different lengths aren’t combined in any sense, it’s just an average….all your ER divided by all your innings times 9.
    Mark Astolfi
    Participant
    To answer one of my own questions…if I’m remembering right, Chris said in one of his videos (which are great BTW, do more!) that there is no penalty for an incorrect ghost runner, just replace him with the correct one. That’s interesting because while that is what is done with an incorrect batter before a completed at bat, after a completed at bat it gets a lot more serious: the correct batter is out and the play is nullified. But nothing comparable to that with the ghost runner, say if he should score, right?
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