National Pastime's Choose Your Own Adventure
The Boards As A Guide
National Pastime's Choose Your Own Adventure
If you’re my age, you’ll remember those old Choose Your Own Adventure books that were popular among elementary school kids.
The concept was pretty simple. You, as the reader, could somewhat control the story by making choices for the main character at the end of each page. One choice would take you to one page; another would take you to another page. The book would have multiple endings, and the whole thing was set up like a puzzle.
Now, National Pastime isn’t exactly like this. It’s not a puzzle, after all, and you don’t have much say in the matter.
However, you absolutely can think of the National Pastime play result numbers as a sort of guide system, one that leads you from one board to the next.
The Map
Here’s a quick map I put together:
It’s pretty simple to understand, of course — and if you don’t remember what the letters stand for, check out my most recent National Pastime post. Play result number 1, for example, will always lead you to board “A” because it is always a home run. Play result number 2 is almost always a triple, clearing the bases and leading you to board “D” — except with runners on first and second, when the result is a home run. And so on.
There’s an asterisk by play result 23 with runners on first and third. This is famous among APBA players: the rainout result.
Board Frequencies
We can easily move into board frequencies.
Note that we’re not looking yet at how often these play result numbers come up. We’ll look at that a bit later.
Here is how frequently each board comes up, adjusting for nothing else:
Now, there’s another thing to remember here. You can’t get to some of these boards easily. In other words, if you have the bases empty, you can’t go in one row to having more than one runner on base (boards E, F, G, or H). We can also look at how frequently each board comes up given a starting board situation:
What does this mean?
It means that, if you assume that all the play result numbers are evenly distributed (they aren’t, of course), you’ve got a 34.15% chance of the bases remaining full after you roll the dice with the bases full.
If you roll the dice with nobody on base, you’ve got a 51.22% chance of the bases remaining empty.
That’s really all this means, by the way. At this early stage, it isn’t particularly useful. We need to know how frequently the play result numbers come up before we can see what this tells us about how the National Pastime boards are actually expected to play.
We also need to know how frequently each of the batters is expected to hit over the course of a replay, which means getting at bat information.
In fact, since we have the lineup sheet, we can also figure out interesting things like how often each team is expected to see certain base runner situations given their starting lineup. There’s a lot of cool and unusual stuff we can look into starting just from this extremely simple baseline.
All of this will take time. Don’t expect a sudden and miraculous breakthrough from me on this one: I’m actually doing this research as I write.