Breaking The National Pastime Patterns
Van Beek's Variations
Breaking The National Pastime Patterns
Clifford Van Beek came up with interesting variations of his National Pastime patterns.
You probably remember some of my earlier work on the subject of the theoretical sample cards that Clifford Van Beek may have used:
These are the sample cards we came up with:
Now, take a look at these two cards:
They fit in with the right handed hitting pitcher pattern right? Well, they kind of fit. The following dice rolls are off:
12 - 34, not 25
13 - 12, not 29
14 - 30, not 27
62 - 25, not 34
63 - 29, not 12
Additionally, Pipgrass wound up with a 27 on dice roll 64, which presumably made up for play result 30 being on dice roll 14. Luque, meanwhile, has 3 different play result 30 dice rolls on his card, but no 27.
Luque is the only player in National Pastime with no 27 on his card. I’m pretty sure we can conclude that he should have received a 27 on dice roll 64.
See the pattern? Van Beek switched up dice rolls 12 and 62, 13 and 63, and 14 and 64. 11, 61, 15, 65, 16, and 66 all remained the same.
Now, Luque and Pipgrass aren’t the only players that were given this treatment. Here’s another pitcher:
Peter Jablonowski is a little bit different. Peter’s results for dice rolls 12 and 62 are swapped. However, Jablonowski has a 29 on dice roll 13 and a 12 on dice roll 63, just as our pattern predicts. In fact the rest of Jablonowski’s card fits the pattern exactly as we would have expected.
Could this be the method Clifford Van Beek used to break his own pattern?
Jesse Haines
There are other interesting variations. Take Jesse Haines, for instance:
Now, remember: we expect to see a 25 on dice roll 12, according to this pattern:
Haines has a 12 on dice roll 12. The 25 winds up on dice roll 63 — which is exactly where the 12 is “supposed” to be.
Haines also has a 30 on dice roll 13, which “should” be play result 29. That 29 shows up on dice roll 64 — which is where that 30 “should” be.
Haines has a 26 on 14, not a 27. The 27 wound up on dice roll 65, where we would expect the 26 to be.
We see the same pattern here, right? Dice rolls 12 and 63 were swapped, dice rolls 13 and 64 were swapped, and dice rolls 14 and 65 were swapped.
There’s another interesting swap here. Haines has a 28 on dice roll 52 and a 32 on dice roll 53 — another direct swap.
Again, I think we’ve figured out how Clifford Van Beek created play result number variation.
Claude Willoughby
Let’s do one more.
Willoughby’s card is kind of strange because he received a 25 on dice roll 41, not a 24 as expected. There is only one other right handed batting pitcher in National Pastime with a 25 on 41: Waite Hoyt, and his card is so strange that we’ll have to dig into it in a future post.
Willoughby’s play result 25 is on 41, swapped with dice roll 12, which has that familiar 24. The 29 that is usually on 13 is now on dice roll 43, and the 13 that was on dice roll 43 is now on 13. Dice rolls 14 and 46 have also been swapped: play result 27 is now on dice roll 46, and play result 33 is on dice roll 14.
Everything else is exactly where it should be.
So What?
Okay, so what? Does this mean there were a lot of printer mistakes, or what?
I don’t think these are printer mistakes. In fact, these show the signs of being deliberate patterns.
We’ve got examples here of outs in the “1s” column (dice rolls 11 through 16) swapping with outs in the “6s” column (dice rolls 61 through 66). We’ve also got an example of outs in the “1s” column switching with outs in the “4s” column.
The pattern fits almost perfectly, with a few very rare exceptions. That tells me a few things about what Clifford Van Beek did:
Van Beek absolutely did use card patterns based on batter handedness, and swapped numbers around for whatever reason (probably to obfuscate the pattern).
Van Beek marked certain dice roll numbers as “hit” numbers, and others as “out” numbers. We know that because he didn’t swap “hit” play results for “out” play results. We’ll look closer into that next time.
We can use this method to identify errors in National Pastime cards. For example, I am convinced that Luque needs a 27 on 64, not a 30.
More next time!