No Caught Stealing System?
Looking at APBA and National Pastime together
No Caught Stealing System?
Ever wonder why APBA and National Pastime don’t have caught stealing systems?
This question comes up on forums every now and then.
APBA fans and defenders come up with all sorts of reasons. The extra outs are already on the cards, they say, or there aren’t enough caught stealing results to be significant, or something like that.
It makes a difference. Anybody who has ever tried to design a baseball game knows that the name of the game is outs. If you’re missing outs, you’ve got a problem — and it’s easy to miss outs on the basepaths. We’re pretty bad about keeping track of those, even to this day of advanced research.
Now, it’s not really proof — but I think I know why Clifford Van Beek didn’t come up with a counter to the famous play result number 11.
There simply wasn’t enough caught stealing data.
The American League kept caught stealing data in 1929 and 1930. In fact, the American League has this data going back many years. This is from the 1931 Reach Guide:
However, the National League did not keep that data:
Of course, that wouldn’t have stopped J. Richard Seitz. It would have been easy for him to turn play result number 12 into a single followed by a caught stealing.
Except for one small problem.
Caught stealing statistics didn’t exist for the National League in 1951.
Again, the American League had them, as you can see from the 1951 Sporting News Guide:
But the National League didn’t:
It’s kind of hard to make a caught stealing system with no data. And that, I believe, is why neither National Pastime nor APBA had such a system.
In theory, Seitz could have made a system once the data was available. However, this would have invalidated his older card sets. Seitz was such a stickler for backwards compatibility that APBA went so far as to issue a guide for creating a method to make Master Game symbols for old sets back in 1975. My memory isn’t perfect, but I believe this was part of the instructions for the Master Game.
Once Seitz had his system in place, he wasn’t going to change it — not for any reason in the world.
And so APBA lacks a caught stealing system to this day.