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There is more randomness in an individual baseball game that necessitates a longer season to crown a winner. Football teams have gone undefeated during the reg
by slg 5y ago
There is more randomness in an individual baseball game that necessitates a longer season to crown a winner. Football teams have gone undefeated during the regular season. The best regular season basketball teams of all time have won close to 90% of their games. The baseball team with the most regular season wins in the last century had a record of 116-46 for a winning percentage of just under 72%.
There is and old baseball saying that no matter how good you are, you're going to lose one-third of your games. No matter how bad you are you're going to win one-third of your games. It's the other third that makes the difference.
40 games simply wouldn't be enough to figure out which teams are actually good.
- throwaway1777 5y agoIf the season were shorter the tactics would be very different and what you said might not be true anymore. For instance you might only need 2 starting pitchers. If you can have Scherzer pitch half your games that’s gonna be very different than having him pitch 1/4 of your games. There’s also the playoffs to consider as a case study. There you have far fewer games so the strategy is very different, and arguably the games are more interesting.
- slg 5y agoI don't think there is much reason to think that would happen. We don't see evidence of that in the regular season as Scherzer's career record is 190-97. We don't see evidence of that in the postseason when even the best teams will generally lose a few games. And we don't see evidence of that in baseball history when in the past a team's best pitcher might start up to half of that team's games. Randomness is just inherent to the game of baseball.