National Pastime Power Numbers
Looking again at an odd phenomenon
National Pastime Power Numbers
It’s been a little while since I last wrote about National Pastime — the first dice baseball game to feature individual player ratings. If you haven’t seen them yet, you can see a collection of previous articles I’ve written about National Pastime here:
One topic that comes up frequently in the APBA community is the odd distribution of power number results. It’s something that has puzzled the APBA community for years — and something that still comes up in online discussions, such as here:
Now, it is technically true that APBA cards can be created so that the math works “right.” In other words, a player that did not hit enough home runs in real life to warrant a 1 play result might be given a 5 or even a 6 instead of a 1. After all, in the right base situation, those results can also lead to home runs.
But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. And this really isn’t an APBA thing, after all. For the most part, J. Richard Seitz copied the results for power numbers 1 through 6 directly from his National Pastime boards.
Let’s take a look at the distribution of those power numbers in National Pastime. This should give you an idea of where the confusion lies.
If you look closely at this table and think about it, you’ll realize that this was never designed to accurately replicate power numbers to any degree of granularity. In other words, the people who have speculated over and over again about whether Clifford Van Beek understood how frequently base runner situations arose in baseball are seeing things in the boards that simply aren’t there.
If Van Beek wanted to create a game that was predictable and easy to create cards for, he would have created boards that read something like this across all situations:
1: HR
2: 3B
3: 2B
But he didn’t, of course.
Play result number 1 is the only absolutely consistent play result in National Pastime. It’s always a home run and never varies.
Play result number 2 is almost always a triple. It turns into a home run with runners on first and second — and, honestly, that should be our first hint that something odd is going on here.
Most APBA players consider play result number 6 to be a double. They tend to overlook the fact that it is a home run with a runner on third and a triple with the bases loaded.
In fact, in the original National Pastime game, play result numbers 3 through 6 are capable of giving any power hitting result so long as the on base situation is correct. Now, this is significant when you realize that every single player in National Pastime has at least one of these numbers. That includes all pitchers, and includes players who didn’t have a single extra base hit in 1930.
When we argue over whether National Pastime was a “parlor game” or a “serious” replaying tool, we really need to keep this in mind. This, like many of the other features Clifford Van Beek subtly placed in his game, is evidence that National Pastime was intended to be a game first.
The inconsistency of those power number results can give card makers nightmares — and, seriously, it would have been a lot easier to just make one number for triples and another one for doubles. That’s what most of APBA’s competitors have done, after all. While you do see split results in Strat-O-Matic, you don’t see results that change arbitrarily based on the base situation:
But how do we know that Van Beek wasn’t some sort of mathematical genius who created this system for the sake of statistical granularity?
Simple. Van Beek didn’t have access to player specific doubles and triples when he created National Pastime.
National Pastime was released in December 1930, in advance of the Christmas season. The official American and National League statistics still had not been published in The Sporting News. It’s very likely that Van Beek used charts like this to create his National Pastime cards:
National Pastime was designed to realistically recreate each player’s batting average, home runs, and stolen bases (i.e. play result number 11, and occasionally 10). And that’s about it. We know that Van Beek didn’t have player specific strikeout and walk statistics, since those results don’t correlate at all with real life statistics. We also know that he didn’t have grounded into double play numbers, since those statistics simply don’t exist for 1930, nor did he have caught stealing statistics, since those statistics were not officially kept.
You can read more of my musings on Van Beek’s statistical sources here:
Honestly, it’s amazing that the National Pastime base game evolved into a simulation like APBA and its many derivatives. The more I look at this game, the more obvious it is to me that it was never intended to be a “serious” simulation. It’s a game, first and foremost, and Van Beek’s focus was on creating something that would be fun to play.