Okay, so today I decided to mess around with the Floyd Baker baseball thing. I’d heard about it a bit, and it sounded kinda interesting, like a different way to look at baseball stats. I’m no expert, but I figured I’d give it a shot.
First, I needed to find some data. This was actually easier than I thought. There are a bunch of websites out there with baseball stats, so I just grabbed some game data from a recent season. I made sure I had the basics: runs, hits, errors, that sort of thing for each team.
Next, I set up a simple spreadsheet. Nothing fancy, just columns for the teams, runs, hits, and errors. I copied and pasted the data I found into the spreadsheet. I double-checked to make sure all the numbers were correct. No typos allowed!
Starting Calculations
Now for the fun part – actually doing the Floyd Baker calculations. It is super easy. I start by creating a game result matrix, like so:
- Took the runs scored by each team and wrote down the results, for example, if Team A scored 5 and Team B scored 3, then I wrote down 5:3 in the matrix.
Then, I want to determine the so-called “quality game”.
- I want to check if the number of hits Team A minus Team B is less than Team A runs.
- For errors, It is the same rule, do Team A minus Team B, the absolute value should be less than the sum of the runs of both teams.
I repeated that for every game I had data for. It took a little while, but it wasn’t too bad. It was actually kind of interesting to see the numbers and make my own calculations.
Finally, I looked at the results. To be honest, I’m still figuring out what it all means. It’s definitely a different perspective on the games. I think I need to play around with it some more to really understand how to use this to analyze baseball games. But hey, it was a fun little project for the day!
