National Pastime Left Handed Hitter Outs

Looking for patterns

National Pastime Left Handed Hitter Outs

I wrote 11 months ago about National Pastime model cards:

In retrospect, I made a few mistakes. As I was continuing this analysis, I decided to return to my prior findings and updated things a bit.

This card represents the “model” card for left handed hitters and switch hitters in National Pastime:

Notice that I’ve removed all 13s, 14s, and base hits from this sample card. We’ll take a look at those separately. All we care about today are the out numbers.

You can spot some pretty interesting patterns just from this sample card. Here are the play result number frequencies, assuming this is the actual card that Clifford Van Beek used as a model:

• 12: 1

• 24: 1

• 25: 1

• 26: 2

• 27: 1

• 28: 2

• 29: 2

• 30: 1

• 31: 2

• 32: 3

• 33: 1

• 34: 2

• 35: 1

13 is always a strikeout and 14 is always a walk. Play result numbers 15 through 23 are either errors or, in the case of 22 and 23, are special numbers that only certain categories of players (i.e. pitchers) have. Play result numbers 36 through 40 are unusual play result numbers that seem to have been used in connection with 14 to limit at bats, and play result number 41 is extremely rare and doesn’t seem to follow any special pattern. And, of course, play result numbers 1 through 11 are all base hits.

We’ll continue to cover those special cases separately as we go through our analysis. For now, all we care about are these “normal” out numbers.

Now, the interesting thing to us today is not how often these numbers show up where we expect them, but, rather, how often they don’t show up.

The following players have the highest number of matches to our model:

20 out of 111 left handed and switch hitting player cards have exact matches for each of these columns, which is a pretty good sign that Van Beek was indeed using a sample card.

Another 16 players were one number off. This seems to have most often been dice roll 34; these players tended to have a 13 on dice roll 34. I’m not entirely certain why some players received this extra 13 while others didn’t. As I’ve said before, there’s pretty good evidence that Clifford Van Beek didn’t have batter specific strikeout and walk totals, which means we’ll have to do some extra digging to figure out what is going on.

This is what the reverse end of that chart looks like. In other words, these are the players who most frequently break the pattern:

4 players have 8 columns that are off; all of them are pitchers. Babe Herman breaks the pattern more often than any other position player, with 7 changes.

And, if you’re interested, here are the “match” rates for each of the dice roll numbers we listed above:

• 12: 101/111, 90.99%

• 14: 81/111, 72.97%

• 16: 106/111, 95.5%

• 21: 109/111, 98.2%

• 23: 79/111, 71.17%

• 24: 88/111, 79.28%

• 26: 109/111, 98.2%

• 32: 107/111, 96.4%

• 34: 65/111, 58.56%

• 41: 111/111, 100%

• 43: 111/111, 100%

• 46: 111/111, 100%

• 52: 107/111, 96.4%

• 53: 83/111, 74.77%

• 54: 82/111, 73.87%

• 56: 104/111, 93.69%

• 61: 77/111, 69.37%

• 62: 78/111, 70.27%

• 63: 97/111, 87.39%

• 65: 108/111, 97.3%

Initially, I expected to discover that Clifford Van Beek used an out number hierarchy to determine where to insert extra 13s, 14s, or where to change things up. I’m not entirely certain that this is true, though I do think that these findings demonstrate some sort of pattern.

It’s also clear that Van Beek occasionally swapped play result numbers. I presume that this was done as a sort of copy protection scheme. We’ll talk about that later.

We’ll look at right handed batters tomorrow.