Mains: The 2019 season, á la mode
From SABR member Rob Mains at Baseball Prospectus on January 2, 2020:
Retrosheet is an absolutely invaluable tool. It powers many of the publicly-available baseball data sites. It’s done 100% by volunteers and everything on the site is free. It’s amazing. Retrosheet has catalogued line scores for games going back to 1871 and play-by-plays going back to 1918. It’s not complete in all cases, but it’s the best we have, and it’s in the public domain. A wonderful, wonderful tool.
For any season, you can download logs of every game. Retrosheet recently posted its 2019 game logs. There are 161 columns worth of data for all 2,429 games played during the season. So I dug into them.
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There were 4.83 runs per game in 2019. But like all averages, that’s pulled up by outliers on the high side. There are games in which teams scored 10 runs more than the average. There are not games in which teams scored 10 runs less than the average. What happened the most frequently?
Read the full article here: https://www.baseballprospectus.com/news/article/56209/flu-like-symptoms-the-2019-season-a-la-mode/
Originally published: January 2, 2020. Last Updated: January 2, 2020.