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Comment by jnordwick | Hacker News Reader

The statistical and scientific nature of baseball is incredibly deep, far deeper than any other sport I can think of. You not only have the one-on-one of pitching that many other sports can rival (think cricket for example which is mostly about this match up), but once you start including men on base and positional state, it becomes absolutely beautiful to analyze.

This isn't to say other sports don't have action (basketball, soccer, etc) or chess like transitional strategy (football), but the scientific wealth of information in baseball is fairly unrivaled because of discrete nature and very calculable states. These qualities make it assaultable mathematically and scientifically in ways other sports that have more flowing nature cannot have done to them.

It's good to see the article give a nod to a cricket bowling study though. Cross-pollination is good. But for mathematics geeks, baseball is the Beautiful Game.

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As a young child I remember telling my dad I thought baseball was boring because you didn't have to think or use strategy, just hit the ball and run. He gently but firmly corrected me and taught me that baseball is the thinking man's game. I still don't really get in to watching it but I've had more respect for it since then.

To me there is no sport that better exemplifies this idea than curling. To the naive observer it just looks like sliding stones down a sheet of ice. But when you understand the game, and level that professionals are able to play at, the strategy and depth of thought involved is simply astounding. It is like chess on ice.

Tennis serves provide much better statistical information as it's the same two people. Baseball is attractive because there are enough things to look at you end up finding correlations in any sample set, which rarely hold up to further investigation.

I'd take it further, baseball creates more discrete events to analyze than tennis. A strike, ball, and hit by pitch are all independently quantifiable (and represent only a tiny subset of pitching metrics) compared to the outcomes possible in tennis.

For those interested, here's[1] a video/paper about using machine learning to predict a pitchers next pitch

[1] http://www.sloansportsconference.com/content/predicting-the-...

It's the thinking man's game because it;s boring. Baseball is unique in that play is limited to brief bursts of activity rarely lasting more than a few seconds. Then the actors return to fixed positions. During these extensive and predictable downtimes everyone has time to calculate and plan. It's like a group of bits all sitting at known energy states waiting for that one random bit to set everything in motion, that being the batter-pitcher outcome. In no other sport are so many of the players physically locked into place every few seconds. In no other sport can observers see and measure them all so regularly. It's the thinking mans game because there is so much downtime in which to ponder so many known values.

Give me the fluidity of soccer, hockey or basketball. That's a very different type of thinking. The great players in those sports are the ones able to keep track of all the motions without the downtime between plays.

> It's the thinking man's game because it;s boring

A very obviously subjective view. What you mean is, it's boring to you. Major League Baseball managed 74 million in total attendance in 2015. Given the 162 games, it manages a remarkable attendance figure per game average (30k).

Something can be boring and popular. In fact, I'd say that the regularity and slow pace of the game allows for a host of activities to occur around it. Chatting, eating, drinking can all be done without missing anything. And it is very suited to broadcast. In the days of radio the downtime allowed the commentator to keep everyone up to speed with everything on the field. Today, television broadcasts display all the stats and the role of color commentator fills the silence. But take all that away and the core game is very slow in comparison to other sports.

I agree - for me, baseball is great as background for other activities. For example, say that you're at a party with your friends. You have conversations that are happening, maybe some beer pong or cornhole or similar party games, and you have the Red Sox in the background. If you hit a lull where your conversation partner goes off to the bathroom or you just lost at beer pong, you can walk over to the TV and relax for a few minutes.

Similarly, bars often have baseball games on for the same purpose.

I like NA Football way more than baseball. I go to dozens of baseball games a year and go to at most one NA football game every few years.

Why? Because baseball is inherently more boring. I can go, drink some beers, eat a hot dog, chat with my friends and have a good time. However I want to see all the activity in the NA football game, and I'll never do that from the 300 level of Gillette Stadium

Given that you can play 162 games in a season, it's certainly not 'the athletes game'.

A lot of MLB players play 150+ games every year. Some play 160+ or all 162. That's typically 162 games in 180 days. They're athletes all right.

My point is that if you can play that many games of sport that frequently, it's not particularly taxing on the body.

It's incredibly difficult for many players to sustain high levels of production over an entire season, to the point that there's even been talk reducing the number of games in the season to relieve the strain it puts on players.

It also frequently comes up as one of the main difficulties players have in adjusting to the major leagues. Additionally, it comes up a subject among managers, wiyh effective managers often being ones take care to rest their players during the season.

The length and strain of the long season are ubiquitous subjects that get talked about all the time, to the point that they are practically defining features of baseball.

I mean the individual game isn't that taxing. Compare to the length of any other team sport - only basketball comes vaguely close at 80ish games. Anything physical is taxing if you do it a ridiculous number of times.

American football is very similar in terms of locking people into set states regularly?

It is interesting in that it allows you to create many set plays, where is other football variants are too fluid and only occasionally allow for set plays.

American Football is certainly very similar, but plays involve a great many more people moving at once. I was at a friend's house recently when he suggested watching a game he had DVRed. I said we didn't have time. I was then witness to something I hadn't seen: an entire football game in a few minutes. A wizard with a DVR remote can speed through all the highlights, absorbing all the important parts of the game in perhaps 15 minutes. I don't think that is possible with soccer/hockey/basketball.

MLB releases an edited/condensed version of every game for free:

http://mlb.com/mediacenter/

> The statistical and scientific nature of baseball is incredibly deep, far deeper than any other sport I can think of

Americans also love to break down and quantify sport metrics and analyze them up the wazoo (see basketball and American football). I have noticed this creep into soccer (not sure if this is to because of the 'America' effect, or because we now have the technology) - only recently did we start getting statistics on number of passes by a player (and success rate) as well as total distance covered in a match.

The traditional 'stats' for soccer were: goals, attempted goals (on/off target), fouls, cards, corners and % possession.

Call me a sport Luddite, but I want to enjoy a good argument with a friend about who the better player is between Messi and Ronaldo without looking up their pass rates.

Agree with your general point, but want to add here that cricket puts of a lot of statistical emphasis on the venue, and order of innings too.

Baseball stadium effect is studied hugely still and in most complex calculations taken into account in some way (usually as an offset for specific traits or types of hits or plays).

Batting order is thought of to mostly be figured out mathematically at least now. In cricket, if you are talking about 20-20, I expect that to be the case too. If you are talking about match, then I'm not sure.

I'm curious what similarity there is in pitch / bowling selection. That is just starting to get looked at in baseball now.

Apparently baseball learned to some degree from hockey. I remember reading in Roger Kahn's The Boys of Summer that the first man the Dodgers hired to stay on top of statistics had done that job for an NHL team.

baseball also has the most games per season (for American sports). Football ends up being arbitrary, and half the teams will play 15 games a year with a specialized roster. Hockey/Basketball have fewer players, but 80ish games. Baseball doubles that with a mix between specialized and general players. It's just slotting in people and measuring stats for defense, and hit percentage on offense. It's made to be dumped into a spreadsheet and graphed.

Two factors that have aided statistical analysis of baseball and helped it secure this reputation: the long term historical data and the large number of games per season.

MMA is sometimes similarly scientific, with every motion of each fighter analyzed and assessed.

MMA has the issue of not having enough data. Fighters only have matches every few months - the wear and tear is too high to have them fighting multiple times per week for half of the year. Another example of this is football - a 16-game season isn't even close to getting the data required to make good analysis.

As a result, even sophisticated commentary on football and MMA tends to be a crapshoot.

Football by _far_ has the best announcers and analystss. Basketball has the second worst. MMA has Joe Rogan - nuf said.

Joking aside. Even your mediocre football analysis is stat filled and the in depth chalk talk on some shows is pretty good.

Some of the basketball play chalk talk is just hideous, contradictory, and stone age in comparison. It really needs a moneyball type thing to happen to it.

Rogan is bad, but Mike Goldberg? Yeesh. A whole new level of gibberish.

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