820 Reasons For A Change
Written by Jacob Fischer [statistics and data collected by Paul Hesson and Jacob Fischer]
Coming out of the NWLA Tournament this past weekend, I was full of several emotions. Firstly, I was dead tired, I played tournament baseball while I was in high school, but haven’t done that much activity in a few years. I was still in awe from what I had just experienced, the uniformity of the fields, ball boys, umpires, and jumbotron had me feeling like a true second rate professional. But most of all I left disappointed. Disappointed, somewhat, in the performance of our team (even though I think we exceeded most everyone there’s expectations), but what I was most disappointed about was the level of competitiveness I encountered. Now don’t get me wrong, every single one of the teams taking the field in Columbus were there to play, but were they there to swing? That I’m not too sure of.
The linescores of our seven tournament games, and another “select” stat were as follows:
16BBs SIXTEEN WALKS. Our pitcher had 12. I was worried after this game… I was thinking we were going to get absolutely pounded the entire weekend. The best pitcher in our league threw more walks in this game than he did all season (Ok not quite Drew had 20BBs in 96 innings in our league). But Skibbe's team at least got 10 hits off of us so at least they were swining the bat a little.
17BBs………. We had 15. Ok something strange is going on there. Either we aren’t as good as we thought we were or there is something larger in play.
17BBs again. We had 7. Well the pitching wasn’t as bad, I think we started to figure something out. More about that later.
TWENTY ONE WALKS. We had 10 on our side. I don’t really know what to say at this point.
This was the end of our pool play games. In the middle of the SRL game, we realized something. We’re not actually playing a game against SRL. We’re playing a game against that little device counting down from 45:00 sitting on the table. That’s all pool play was about. We were essentially playing keep away, eating as much clock as possible.
At this point in the tournament, I was very dejected. I looked forward to nothing more than coming to this tournament to see how our team stacked up against some of the best in the country. But evidentially, we play a different type of game in Huntington. We swing the damn bat. I honestly couldn’t tell you whether we are better or worse than the four teams we played in our pool, cause watching a 45 minute merry-go-round doesn’t tell you much about a team’s talent.
Well now that that pesky clock is out of the way, maybe these games will be a little bit more competitive.
Nope. TWENTY TWO BASES ON BALLS. We had 11 on our side.
23BBs walks. We had 17. For the love of all things holy. This was the most frustrating game I have ever participated in in my entire life. I don’t know what will come sooner, a player from Mequon swinging at three pitching in an at bat, the release of Half-Life 3, or the second coming of Christ. Literally though.. I guess the best I could say, was these guys had some out of this universe plate discipline so a tip of a hat to them.
14 walks total. We had 11. This was the first game, were I really felt like we got beat. Yes we lost 23-1 to SWBL, but I felt like that team was more reachable than FF.
And with that loss, we were ousted from the tournament. Finishing in either 7th or 8th place (I don’t remember at this point). So through our 7 games, we had the pleasure of experiencing 130 walks, dishing out 83 walks ourselves. We were walking as much as possible just so that we could compete. Everyone else was coming to the plate with their bats on their shoulder and it was not paying to swing away for us if the other team was just waiting to see if we could get two strikes on them before getting in the game. Our pitchers felt like they were at carnival booth trying to see if they could win a rigged game. Step right up, folks!
We saw several pitchers from leagues modify their fast-pitch styles to more lob style pitching in an attempt to get the other team to swing. However, some teams still managed to not take the bait. It is for this reason that pool play had to be timed and it is for this reason that this tournament turned into an absolute snoozefest from time to time. This chess-like strategy teams are coming to town with is pretty boring. Is this a wiffleball tournament or the March of Dimes?
So on our very short two-hour ride home, I thought about what I had just witnessed. If I wanted to spend 12 hours walking, I would have gone to a cake walk, and at least that way I could have gotten some free cake out of it. Now the easy explanation is that our pitchers just weren’t up to par with the rest of the tournament. We only pitch from 45’ rather than 48’, and I know that all of our pitchers, myself included had a difficult time adjusting to the new distance, but after hitting against these guys all season, I know what they can do and there had to be another factor contributing to what I felt was a sub-par performance.
Once I got back home, and looked at the tournament stats as a whole, I realized it was not just an issue with our pitchers. There were 820 walks in the pool play and DE Tournament games. In 116 games, that’s a TON. So I dug a little deeper and did some stat compiling. I went to all 15 teams' league pages, and compiled total stats for all of the participating leagues.
I would like to take this time to comment on the leagues homepages. I spent more time than I would care to admit searching through league pages for stats, and even league rules for those I could find. A good number of the league either use LeagueLineup exclusively or to at least host their stats (I thank you). Some league’s home pages looked liked they fit in as many little boxes and pictures as they could on one screen. It was definitely The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.
I compiled stats, but I also looked through league rules or the number of outs per innings, number of balls for a walk, and even the pitching distance as I feel all three could be factors in a teams performance.
Of the 15 leagues, I was able to find stats for 14 of them. CWBC, for toting “totally unnecessary statistical analysis” not having 2014 stats easily locatable was a little disappointing.
Of the 15 leagues, I was able to find a rule book for 12 of them. Five leagues pitch from 48’, three from 45’, one from 42’, one from 33’, and two leagues didn’t have a pitching distance in their rules that I could find (GBL and SWBL). And again from what I could find, only two leagues issue walks on six balls, all others were five, and one league (PWL) do not appear to issue walks at all.
And so from here, this is what I found. I compiled all the leagues regular season stats, and compared them to their NWLA Tournament stats, as well as MLB’s stats from this year. From there, I did averages on the order of per out and per game.
Those are some nice numbers! But what do they really mean? Well that’s when we can implement the number of walks for every out made, and the average number of walks per game.
I will note here that the walk numbers are a little bit skewed for the leave averages since PWL doesn’t play with walks. But say we put in a dummy value of 1000BBs in 252 games. That would make them the 4th highest walking league in the NWLA behind KWL (1318BB in 320GP), WSEM (1501BB in 260GP), and HRL (1818BB in 402GP). By giving them 1000BBs that raises the per out average from 0.300 to 0.336, and the per game average from 3.988 to 4.462. It helps, but it doesn’t even come close to the rate we saw in the tournament.
Well this is a little more enlightening. Everything looks in order. Hits, home runs, and RBIs are slightly lower than the cumulative league averages which makes sense, we are sending the best of the best from our leagues to pitch, I’m sure its very difficult to hit. Oh look at that, the K rate went up as well that follows what we’re expecting, better pitching makes for more difficult hitting. But what’s this?! The walk rate is nearly TWO TIMES higher in the tournament than it is during our leagues. Sure the hitters are better so they have a better eye, but when everything else is slightly better than average, this sticks out like a sore thumb. In pool play games, you could LITERALLY walk up to the plate without a bat for an entire inning, and have a fairly decent chance at scoring a run. Now this doesn’t seem right, and I bring us back to my question at the beginning. Are we here to play some wiffle ball or play ring around the rosey for a few hours? I think that most of us can agree that we have a problem on our hands here, but what can we do to remedy the problem? Well I believe that there are several plausible solutions that can be made, they’ll quicken up the games, and I believe make them a whole lot more competitive and fast paced. These suggests are both going from most plausible/helpful and as they come to me.
Adopt the first pitch strike rule. If you’re not familiar with the rule, if the first pitch of an at bat makes contact with the strike board, and the batter does not swing, then it is an automatic strike out. Several leagues have already adopted this rule, and it is definitely something unique to wiffle ball. It was something I struggled with first coming into the game. My entire baseball career, I have been preached to, that unless that first pitch is absolutely perfect, take the first pitch. Make that pitcher work for his out. But in wiffle ball, it’s a different story. The games should be fast paced and always moving, and having a first pitch strike rule would definitely keep the batters on their toes and looking the swing the bat (What Blastphemy?!). But at this point, one strike isn’t going to do us much good, as some teams will even hold out until receiving a second strike to pick the bat off their shoulder. So here goes my second suggestion.
Implement the two strikes for a strike out rule. From what I’ve seen, there were two leagues than implemented such a rule, WSEM and CWBC. Now this rule both by itself or coupled with suggestion one would definitely speed up the process and force a team to hit. But you say then we would have so many strike outs and the players wouldn’t be able to bat! Well if you’ve been selected to be a part of your leagues national team, you should be able to make contact with the ball. I didn’t see too my pitchers this past weekend that were so nasty I said to myself, I’d never be able to hit him!
Change to six balls for a walk. Now I’m not too sure how much I like this suggestion. Our league plays by this rule, and even now we are thinking about changing it. This change doesn’t necessarily get a hitter to take the bat off their shoulder, but it gives the pitcher one more opportunity at throwing a strike before surrendering a walk. I think that at this point, the tournament is very hitter heavy, and as a pitcher, I want to sway the game and make it a little more even.
Decrease the pitching distance to 45’. With the brand new wiffle balls, it can be difficult to get a grip on the ball, and throw it as accurately as possible, and decreasing the distance would make that process slightly easier. This also adds another element to the pitching game, speed. With how light the ball is, it is losing velocity quite rapidly as its approaching the strike board. By shortening the distance, it would allow for more options other than throwing those 8 foot bending breaking balls.
Alter the time of the pool play games. At 45 minutes, that seems like a good time period, but it a can go very quickly. One of our pool play games was only two innings long, possibly make a minimum number of innings for a pool play game regardless of time, and make some repercussions if that inning requirement isn’t met.
In the end, maybe it’s just us. Maybe we were expecting to do big things, and are just a little hurt we didn’t do as well as we wanted to. But I think its more than that. Maybe my suggestions have been brought up before, maybe no one has thought there has been an issue? I’m not sure. For all but two of us, this was our first year attending the NWLA tournament; maybe we just need to adjust to the play style. We could come back next year, with no changes made to the tournament’s format, and be completely accustomed to the tournament and perform to our level, but I don’t think that would be an end-all-be-all solution. At the end of the day, this was a first class event, with no expense spared, but in my opinion, I didn’t think the competition from top to bottom was the best it could be.
Questions? Comments? I’ll post the stat books I made on our website if someone wants to pick through them themselves and see if they can get anything for or against my suggestions or views in the numbers. I used some very crude “statistics”, and maybe someone more inclined to the world of sabermetrics can make a stronger argument. I think it would be interesting to see how many runs scored in the tournament were solely from four or more consecutive walks. It could also be enlightening to see how many games ended with a team scoring more runs than they had in hits, again another sign either the fielders are making errors, or the is an excessive amount of outs. But that’s for someone who has more time on their hands than me.
