They'll take you to Australia!

[austin_dern]

I'm feeling very nervous about a bit of know-it-all-ism I deployed recently in alt.fan.cecil-adams. The question started out with how magic numbers work --- the combination of the leading team's wins and the trailing team's losses which would clinch first place for the leading team --- and I'm confident that I explained that competently enough. (I worked out the formula for myself back in middle school and was excessively proud for it.)

The thing is, the original poster asked a hypothetical: at the moment of questioning, the White Sox had 85 wins and 68 losses, and the Twins 83 wins with 68 losses. The White Sox magic number was seven (from which we can conclude they had nine games left to play), and were leading the Twins by two and a half games. Suppose, went the hypothetical, the White Sox lose all their remaining games, while all the remaining Twins games are rained out (and let's hope they aren't playing each other the rest of the season). Who wins, and how does the magic number affect things?

As I make it out, this situation would leave the White Sox at the end of the season with an 85-77 record, and the Twins with an 83-71 record. I think that would give the Twins the pennant, as they'd be be on top in percentages and the White Sox would be two games behind in the standings. But that leaves me really, really uncomfortable. It has happened that teams have had the same number of wins and the pennant goes to the one with fewer losses, in the old days when there were more tied and never-completed games, but giving it to the one with fewer wins leaves me very nervous. It feels like the Twins would be forced to make up at least enough games to clinch in their own right. I've got to figure this out before I go mad.

(Say, how long do you suppose it's going to take for there to be a legend of the Yankees being cursed by leaving Real Yankee Stadium? If it didn't start seven years ago, I mean.)

Trivia: The referee at the Dempsey-Tunney 22 September 1927 ``fight of the century'', with the infamous long count, was named Dave Barry. Source: 1927: High Tide of the 1920s, Gerald Leinwand.

Currently Reading: The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, The Epidemic That Shaped Our History, Molly Caldwell Crosby. You know, science fiction plagues never seem to have the ... quirky accidental nature of the real ones.

Comments

[xolo.livejournal.com]

Say, how long do you suppose it's going to take for there to be a legend of the Yankees being cursed by leaving Real Yankees Stadium?

For the moment, I'm happy that the Cubs have won their division, although I know that the wrath of the Scorned Goat will inevitably bring it all to bitter ashes.

[moxie_man]

Maybe the Cubs will need to make a blood sacrifice like the other Sox did. :)

[moonfires.livejournal.com]

They haven't played in Real Yankee Stadium since the 1973-1975 renovation.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

I agree that the Twins would somehow end up playing more games. Baseball would throw doubleheaders at this situation like mad; were the Twins unable to play somehow (and there's lots of ways for that to happen: relocation of games to a neutral site, or simply the opposite ballpark) they or their opponents would simply have to forfeit games. I'd imagine there'd probably be a 'one for you, one for me' forfeit agreement, though given the desire of professional sports to get money from the fans in every manner shape and form possible, I'd be amazed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forfeit_(baseball)

Also, just to note, the Twins play in a dome. That's one heck of a road series to get rained out nine days in a row.

--Chi

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Oh tsk. Wrigley's still Wrigley, much as I can grouse about lights; and Yankee Stadium is still as real as ever, until it's pieced out so that slivers of seats can end up in chase cards for Upper Deck.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Frankly, the world has barely made sense since 2000.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Well, it may not be merely the Scorned Goat. There were other some major incidents producing bad karma for the Cubs.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Tank McNamara had a fine joke a Sunday or two back about spectators being searched as they leave Yankee Stadium.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

They had the ground, at least. And did rather well for architecture inflicted on places in the mid-70s.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Yes, I found what I did wrong: in this hypothetical crash/rain-out, the Twins start out with a magic number of 12 (Twins wins plus White Sox losses required for the Twins to finish on top). Given a White Sox Collapse, that would be nine Sox losses, and so the Twins would still have a magic number of 3 when the White Sox were done playing.

The Twins would have to play to either their third win or to all the remaining scheduled games, because the unplayed games --- up until that third win --- would be able to affect the final standings.

The awesome yet impossible option that would be too cool to ever happen would be for the Twins to schedule a triple header to try making it all in one day. Pretend that's needed so that the postseason can start and give us a World Series completed before Thanksgiving. While that concept has fallen out of favor, the Official Rules do allow for the scheduling of a Complete Game set to be only seven innings, and 21 innings in one day is not enormously longer than the 18 innings an ordinary double-header would require. If the baseball world were on the verge of collapsing it might be possible.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

I think to get a triple-header in, you'd have to have co-operation from the players, who would quite frankly scream bloody murder about it. And much as I agree that professional baseball players do seem to be generally overpaid blah blah, I wouldn't want to subject them to twenty-one innings in a day. Pitchers' arms would be falling off, especially if any games were in a tie in the 7th. Hitters would be protesting, even using the full compliment of the team.

(Baseball pitchers are, sadly, pushed to the real extreme of their physical limits. Testing done on cadavres show that the rotational motion of pitching a baseball at major-league speeds is enough to fracture bones and rend tendons; it's amazing more of them aren't on the DL.)

I suspect the worst the players' union would ever agree to as far as makeup games would be double-headers every night until it ends.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, it would exhaust the pitching pool, certainly, although again --- assuming it didn't fall to extra innings --- it wouldn't be much different from a regular doubleheader where one or both games picked up a few innings. No denying you would need to be on the edge of the end of the world to even consider it, though.

On the other hand, think of how tantalizingly irresistible the statistics would be if any of these were a seven-inning perfect game. People would be arguing about it for centuries to come.

I'm not sure what's the longest sequence of double-headers ever played (even if you count non-consecutive doubleheaders, like, a morning/afternoon game pair).

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, I count any two baseball games played in the same midnight[*1] to midnight period as a double-header, even if one were a morning and one a late evening.

[*1] At least, both begun in the same midnight to midnight period, and more realistically, we could say sunup until midnight, as baseball just doesn't start before sunrise.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Sunup to sunup works. Baseball is willing to call it a doubleheader even when there's hours between games; to me, it feels like more than a short pause between the games spoils the headedness of it.

According to Wikipedia, the current collective bargaining agreement prohibits tripleheaders unless the first game is the continuation of a suspended earlier game and there are no single games left in the season to use for the completion. And it looks, alas, like there aren't going to be any apocalypses except for the Mets and Brewers.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Sunup to Sunup seems good, yes. Although teams playing, say, an 'opening day' game in Japan could screw things up nicely with time zones if need be, but now we're getting even sillier.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Wouldn't be a real problem, at least not unless someone scheduled games in Tokyo and Anchorage. There's no credible way to get a team from Japan to the United States, with enough time to recuperate from the time zone change and the flight, otherwise.