Baseball By the Numbers

By Chris Pollay

I love baseball for many reasons, but what truly fascinates me about the game is the numbers. You can break down all of the statistics for any given team and see patterns and rhythms emerge. Over the course of a long season, those numbers even out and reveal a great many things about a team's strengths and weaknesses. In fact, the game seems downright predictable when you dissect it down to its core numbers.

However, then you go and watch it live and the numbers inevitably fly right out the window. The southpaw .211 8th-spot hitter with no home runs for the year shockingly pounds a grand slam against the lefty pitching ace with an ERA of 2.11

That is baseball in a nutshell: You always know exactly what to expect but never know what is actually going to happen.

Those jaw-dropping moments happen every day if you follow the sport, and it always hits you like a jolt of electricity whenever it does. After all, you have seen the numbers and are aware EXACTLY how odd it is when the players defy them so cavalierly.

That's why yesterday's Philadelphia Phillies' game was quite exciting to me even though it was a 22-1 blowout over the Reds. Why? Because 20 runs or more is a statistical anomaly.

As the runs piled up, my mind was full of questions. Have the Phillies always fared this well against the Reds this season? In fact, they have beat them three out of four games by a cumulative score of 39-14. Yikes.

When's the last time the Phils scored 20 or more runs? That would be June 13, 2008 when they hammered the St. Louis Cardinals 20-2. About three weeks before that, the Phils also pounded the Colorado Rockies 20-5.

My next thought was: Hmmm. I wonder how the Phils do AFTER they score 20 runs in a game.

After they stomped all over St. Louis, it took them another five games to score another 20 runs and they ended up losing 11 of their next 14. Great.

However, they followed the Colorado creaming by winning ten of their next 12. They even scored 25 more runs in their next three games combined. That's promising.

Of course, all the conjecture over 20-run games had me thinking about the raw awesomeness of the Phils' offense. So, naturally, I wondered how many times this season they had scored over 10 runs.

This year, they have done it 13 times so far (already!) and won every game (to nobody's surprise). Just for fun, I calculated the collective score of those 13 games. The Phils outscored their opponents by a 154 to 65 margin! Good grief.

Incidentally, I also researched that the Phils scored ten or more runs ten times in 2008, 17 times in 2007 and 18 times in 2006.

OK. Sure, the Phils blow out teams on a regular basis, but what about the opposite? How many times have the Phils' inconsistent pitching staff given up ten runs this year? It turns out that they have done it six times and are 2-4 in those games. I was actually surprised to see they had won two games when they gave up that many runs.

Still, I think a better measure of a team is how they perform in close contests. So, I looked that up, too. The team is 6-5 in games that have gone extra innings. They are 8-10 in one-run games. That distressed me a bit. Those numbers are a direct reflection of how the bullpen has struggled this season.

In games decided by two runs, however, they are 10-5, which is considerably better. They can win the close ones IF they have just enough of a cushion, apparently.

At that point, I finally became exhausted and decided I had had enough numbers for the day.

Although, I did manage to think about one more (which is perhaps the most important): the Phils have won four straight and are on a roll!