Baseball is not simply a game of physical skill.  The 100-meter dash is a game of physical skill.  Baseball is a game of numbers.  Statistics. Probabilities.  Geometry.  The distance between the bases is always 90 feet and the runners always go counter-clockwise.  Math is math.  The players are the variance.  The players are not the game.  The game is the game.  The players are the variance.  Baseball is a game of math.  Especially a computer sim version of baseball that is based on algorithms.  I'm sure you could make a lot of money if you actually had tiny skillful humans physically playing baseball inside your CPU. 

For your first rebuttal, I'm glad you made that point; I'll compare baseball to blackjack and poker all I want.  They're all sabermetric.  In fact, there's a guy you've probably heard of named Nate Silver who happened to freelance in the poker until he decided to actually apply his brain to something useful.  If I said to you hey tec, in a 10 person tournament where 3 ppl got paid, if I gave you the option to run 5% better in your all-ins in the very beginning with 10 ppl remaining, right in the middle with 5 ppl remaining, or right at the end with 2 people remaining, which would you choose?  You sound like a guy who would say "with 5 people remaining".  It's the same as baseball.  If you want to know why the right answer is the inarguably the right answer, "It's just math."

I reference blackjack because I personally participated in thousands of hands of it but more importantly because bj's game theory is well-known, and its theories have been proven and replicated yet people still stand on 16 vs a 10 and don't double 11s vs 10 because they think they are smarter than math. 

None of that other stuff you said matters to me, I'm not going to argue the rest of it.  I'm sure we could go on and on forever and all of the things I am saying could have already been proven true in equivalent situations by other people who are smarter than either of us. I could say the sky was blue and you'd still argue that it wasn't because some guy in Baseball Prospectus said it wasn't. 

At least at the end of the day show a little respect and think about it instead of automatically assuming that I'm wrong or I'm an idiot because you've posted more times on these message boards or invested more money playing more HBD seasons. Indeed, I am still learning the algorithms which is why I put in the 15 seconds to ask the question "does this configuration exist".  You said no, so thank you for the answer.  If you happen to know (/to be one of) the developers, put in a good word and tell them that the #1 most important thing to keep this site afloat is to make sure the SIM engine is as customizable as possible.  Have a nice day.

Umm, OK.

Posted by pjfoster13 on 1/23/2014 7:59:00 PM (view original):
Do not short-quote me. I'm sorry that your attention span is not enough to at least say hmm that's interesting.

The ML season can be more accurately compared to an amalgamation of single-table poker sit & gos rather than one six-month-long cash game where you tally up the score at the end and it's 900 to 800 or whatever. If an ML season was a six-month-long cash game, then an out in the 4th inning on May 5th would have the same value as an out in the 9th inning on September 25th.  But it's more similar to sit & gos where the decisions at the end are more important than those at the beginning.

In response to tec- Based on everything in your post, if outs are somehow more valuable in later innings than in earlier innings, are runs also more valuable in later innings than they are in earlier innings?

Yes, of course, that's why teams only do defensive replacements and pinch-hitting/pinch-running at the end. Nobody would argue otherwise about pinch runners so why would you argue otherwise about closers vs setup men it makes no sense

The example of pinch hitters/runners and defensive replacements as late inning only substitutions isn't really helpful to your argument.. Generally speaking, those players are inferior to the ones they replaced. They just happen to be better than that player in one particular skill that the manager deems more important for that particular situation. Since you can't put the starter back in, of course those moves get saved for later innings. It's not because runs are more valuable in late innings, it's because you don't want to take at bats from a good hitter and give them to a defensive replacement who hits .220, or give fielding chances to a guy with an iron glove who you brought in to hit against a lefty reliever.

Save your time.  pjfoster has "dismissed" us all from further discussion.

biz is back?

Posted by MikeT23 on 1/23/2014 8:18:00 PM (view original):

Hell, I'll make it a yes/no question for simplicity's sake.

Do you think the 3/4/5 hitters come to the plate, with 0 out, a runner on 2nd in the 7th with a one run deficit and think "i can go about 90% here because we've got the rest of the order coming up in the 8th and 9th.  No need for full effort here in the 7th"?

I guess this was too complicated.

I know hitters say "Ah, screw it.   We've got two more AB after this inning.  No need to try to score in this one."

FYI . . .this was pjfoster's comment on page 1 that ignited this discussion:

"a team's best reliever should always be its closer and from an actual baseball game theory perspective that's not open for debate"

Clearly, it's debatable.  When pjfoster realized that he could not debate and defend his point effectively, he took his ball and went home.

That's not the worst thing he stated as fact, IMO.

I just think it's dumb to believe players think "We have two more innings after this one.   We can score then so I'm only going to give 73% in this AB."

Managers may manage differently but a player is going to do his best to get a hit and drive in the run whether it's the 3rd or 9th inning.   And the pitcher/defense will do their best to prevent that regardless of the inning.  It's called "doing your job". 

Hell just get Sparky Lyle or Mike Marshall and put him in to start the 8th and pitch through the 11th if you need it.

Personally, I think this was worse:

"Always save your closer until tomorrow." The best closer is one you'll never need to use.

In pj's perfect world, in which blackjack game theory can be applied to baseball, Mariano Rivera's best season would be one in which he sits in the 'pen the entire season and never has to make an appearance.

That would probably have been the Yankees best season.  Unless, of course, Rivera never pitched because they were always down by 10.

Posted by MikeT23 on 1/24/2014 9:08:00 AM (view original):
That's not the worst thing he stated as fact, IMO.

I just think it's dumb to believe players think "We have two more innings after this one.   We can score then so I'm only going to give 73% in this AB."

Managers may manage differently but a player is going to do his best to get a hit and drive in the run whether it's the 3rd or 9th inning.   And the pitcher/defense will do their best to prevent that regardless of the inning.  It's called "doing your job". 

I'm not reading his novels, but the idea that runs are more valuable depending on the inning is probably the worst thing he said.

Didn't see that but, yeah, that's dumb too.     I beleive, if you win 4-3 by scoring 4 in the 1st, the runs were just as valuable if you scored all 4 in the 9th.

My head is spinning. What if the closer is LH and you want to play him at 2nd base in the 9th inning?

Yes, that is the key to his whole argument. If runs are more valuable as the game goes on, by the stats he mentioned, his theory would be correct. I'm not convinced that is the case though. The example of teams using defensive replacements and pinch hitters does not prove that runs are more valuable as the game goes on. Defensive replacements are used to limit runs scored against by sacrificing runs for your team. And vice versa for pinch hitters (defensive liability in the field).

I would like to hear more supporting evidence for why runs are more valuable later on in the game, but I don't think this is correct. If I score 2 lowest value runs in the 1st inning, but you score 1 highest value run in the 9th, do you win?? The value of scoring runs and preventing runs from being scored changes at different rates at different stages of games. This doesn't imply players' levels of effort changes. This just means that a run scored/prevented adds more probability to winning a game at different stages in different scenarios.