Strikeouts And Walks By Team In National Pastime

Did Clifford Van Beek assign 13s and 14s on a team basis?

Strikeouts And Walks By Team In National Pastime

Somebody asked in the comments section a few days ago whether strikeouts and walks might have been assigned by team in National Pastime.

This is a good question — especially since we suspect that Clifford Van Beek used a team approach to assign error numbers.

In general, teams that committed more errors in real life in 1930 received fewer error play result numbers — and teams that committed fewer errors received more error play result numbers. This is what it looks like:

It doesn’t seem to have been a hard and fast rule, but the pattern is pretty obvious. The Athletics and Senators didn’t commit many errors, and therefore wound up with hitter cards that had more error rolls than the Indians and Phillies.

Do strikeouts and walks work the same way? After all, we know that Clifford Van Beek had no way of tallying the number of strikeouts and walks that each individual hitter had in 1930, since those numbers did not appear in box scores. Perhaps Van Beek used a similar strategy — giving teams that struck out more opponents fewer strikeout numbers, for example, or giving teams that walked more opponents fewer walk numbers.

Well, unfortunately that’s not really what happened.

Here’s how pitcher strikeouts look when compared to dice roll 13 by team:

There’s really no pattern here at all. The Athletics struck out over 300 more batters than the Red Sox — and yet they almost received the same number of batter 13s.

One thing that is interesting here is the small range of 13s. The Reds and Indians had 50 per team; the Phillies had 64; every other team was between those totals. While it doesn’t tell us how Clifford Van Beek assigned strikeout numbers, it does indicate that he tried to issue a similar number of 13s to each team.

Next come the walks:

There is even less of a pattern here — and the range between teams is smaller, believe it or not.

I’m not certain precisely how Clifford Van Beek assigned 13s and 14s. I do know, however, that it has nothing to do with real life strikeouts and walks in 1930, nor does it have anything to do with strikeouts and walks issued by team pitching.