National Pastime Walks

One of the problem areas

National Pastime Walks

The two problem statistics for National Pastime are walks and strikeouts.

These are problem statistics because they are not statistics that were reported in the daily boxscores in 1930.

I’ll show you what I mean. Here’s a fuzzy boxscore for the July 28, 1930 Chicago White Sox at St. Louis Browns game:

If you look closely at the bottom, you’ll see what I’m talking about. These are the only mentions of strikeouts and walks in the entire boxscore:

Bases on balls — Off Lyons 2, off Collins 2

Struck out — By Collins 5, by Lyons 5

That’s it. There’s nothing about who struck out or walked.

This is because strikeouts and walks were treated as pitcher actions for most of baseball history. It was something good or bad that the pitcher did, not something that the batter worked for.

It’s not just The Sporting News that’s like this. Here’s a boxscore from that same game as it appeared in The St. Louis Star:

Note that there’s even less information here about strikeouts and walks.

To finish it off, here’s the same game in The Chicago Daily Tribune, a paper from which we have more readable scans:

We can keep playing this game. We could go through any newspaper in the United States or Canada, and we would see the same thing.

This is because boxscores followed a set pattern in those days. All newspapers printed the same boxscores. They largely came from the same source.

This is what Clifford Van Beek had to work with.

Now, the truth is that there was batter specific walk and strikeout data. You can find it in the baseball guides, such as this from The 1931 Reach Base Ball Guide:

Note, of course, that these statistics are only presented for hitters with 10 or more RBIs.

This data was also printed in The Sporting News for the same players — usually several months after the season was finished.

From The Sporting News, December 4, 1930, page 5

The above chart was printed in The Sporting News the week before the first National Pastime advertisement appeared. It only includes American League players who had 10 or more RBI. The National League statistics were not printed until January 1, 1931 — which was several weeks after the only National Pastime ad was printed.

In other words - we don’t expect that National Pastime would successfully emulate the number of walks each player had in 1930. We’d expect that there would be some problems, since it seems likely that Van Beek did not have access to this data.

Now, it’s easy to calculate expected walks in National Pastime. Play result 14 is the only way a player can realistically walk. Technically players could roll enough of play results 36 through 40 to earn a walk with the bases empty, but it’s not likely due to the makeup of the cards.

To determine expected walks, we simply count up the number of 14s on each card, divide that total by 36, and then multiply it by the number of plate appearances the player had in real life.

Here’s what the top of our chart looks like, arranged by most walks in real life:

As you can see, the numbers are all over the place. Most players won’t get enough walks in National Pastime. Babe Ruth will have almost 100 walks too few, since he only received 3 14s on his card. Max Bishop was give 6 14s for whatever reason, but will still wind up with too few walks.

Here’s the bottom of the chart:

Things are a little bit more reasonable here, though it’s still not perfect. Every single player received at least 1 14, even if he had 0 walks in real life.

So what are those 14s doing there?

I strongly suspect that Van Beek used a combination of play result numbers 14, 36, 37, 38, 39, and 40 to control batting averages. None of those play results end in an at bat being charged to the batter — in theory, that is. There are a few play results with runners on base that do, though I strongly suspect that these were intended to be sacrifice bunts.

In other words — I think Van Beek added these numbers to cards mostly to massage the batting averages a little bit.