 |
| Sox and Twins binary game score looks like a computer nerd's dream, but a fantasy baseball offensive nightmare. |
"I don't want no hits, cuz a hit is a ball that ain't get glove from me".
If TLC rewrote their song "No Scrubs" for baseball purposes, we might get something like that. Speaking of no hits, the White Sox managed to get as many hits today as Dustin Diamond's webpage. Francisco Liriano threw his first career complete game, striking out a pedestrian two batters and walking six. I first paid attention to the lack of hits around the 6th inning, when 0s were lined up like Cheerio's in a bowl.
Being down 1-0 from the 4th inning on, there was never a point in the game, where we didn't have the game-tying, go-ahead, or game-winning batter in the box on offense. However, I was faced with a sports person's conundrum:
"Do I root for a no-hitter or do I root for my team to win?"
It seems like an easy question to answer. You root for your team to win, no questions asked.
An aside: keep in mind that entering the game, only 269 no-hitters (retrosheet.com) have been thrown in the 396,126 games played in baseball history (baseball-reference.com), dating back to 1876. The odds of you seeing a no-hitter at any random game in history is 0.00067% chance. And now, my brother and I have seen 2 of the 270 (almost 1% of the no-hitters thrown in) in the history of baseball.
In the early part of me noticing the no-hit bid, I was definitely on the side of wanting them to win, but a small part of me said, screw it, I wanna see a no-hitter.
After the 8th inning came and went without a hit and we were still down 1-0, I started to move into the camp of "I want to see a no hitter", with "I want the only hit to be a walk-off home run" in 2nd place.
The Twins' 9th inning went without a hitch offensively, leaving Liriano to face the 9-1-2 part of the Sox order. After a quick first out, Liriano put Pierre on base with his 6th and final walk of the game before retiring the next two guys and capping off the no-hitter. An awkward celebration of what we just saw ensued, celebrating a rare event in baseball that happened against your team. I had (and still have) no clue on how I should have acted in that scenario.
Do you root for the no-no to see history? Or do you always root for your team to ruin it, no questions asked? Or does it depend on how much your team is trailing by? I think cheering against your team in a no-hitter where you're losing 8-0 would be easier to do than in a 1-0 game.
In any regard, seeing such a rare event at a baseball game would seem to outweigh the rooting for your team to muster out a hit, unless of course you're needing that game to make the playoffs or are in the playoffs when that event is happening against you.
To leave you with random facts and awesome numbers:
The odds of hitting all 6 numbers in a 52 ball lottery is 1 in 20,358,520, or 0.0000049%.
My friend Tim has now seen a no-hitter, triple play, batter hit for cycle and 4 HRs by a player in a game.
All stats as of Tuesday
| Total games, MLB history | 396,126 | Likelihood of seeing one (%) |
| Occurrences of… | ||
| No-hitters | 269 | 0.000679077 |
| Cycles | 291 | 0.000734615 |
| Triple Plays | 684 | 0.001726723 |
| 4 HR games | 15 | 3.78667E-05 |
| *editor's note: My math was severely flawed on his odds. For a link on the breakdown of being able to see all 4 of these, here's Jason Lyen's breakdown of probability. | ||
| Likelihood of seeing all 4 | 3.26181E-14 | (or 0.00000000000326%) |
When your team has the worst record in all of baseball, it is totally acceptable to root for the no hitter.
ReplyDeleteI'm starting to think that even if my team had the best record or better record, I wouldn't have minded, provided it wasn't a playoff game or a game late in the year that had some playoff implications.
ReplyDelete