The World Baseball Classic Broke So Many Fuckin Brains This Year
RDT blogged it already, but I'm circling back with all the mathematical context from this utterly preposterous statistic to kick off our round up blog.
Here's my layman's interpretation:
On average, Mike Trout will swing and miss 3 times just once out of every 258 plate appearances.
1/258 = .0039
That's two straight months of playing baseball every single fucking day against the world's best pitchers without whiffing 3 times in the same at bat.
Another way to say it...
There was a 99.61% chance Mike Trout did not swing and miss 3 times against Ohtani.
NINETY NINE POINT SIX
Some more context.
- Justin Tucker is 3x more likely to miss a field goal from inside 35 yards than what happened to Trout last night.
- The United State infant mortality rate (I feel like Klemmer) is notably higher than "Mike Trout swings and misses 3 times" which is fucked up to reflect upon. But that's what the CDC says so take it to the bank.
- You're more likely to get into a car accident later today (yes, you) than Mike Trout whiffing thrice last night.
- Steph Curry misses both free throws, on average, twice as frequently as Mike Trout swings and misses three times. I don't know if Steph Curry has ever missed both free throws either. I'm just working off numbers here guys and the numbers say that the final out of the 2023 WBC wasn't just romantically impossible. It was a near statistical-anomaly at the biggest moment in either player's career.
Those are my opening thoughts to the blog. Truly remarkable it ended the way it did.
Some other observations as we put an end to the WBC:
- It's healthy to keep liberal guidelines for eligibility. Like that kind of annoyed me throughout the tournament. People complaining that "THIS GUY ISN'T BRITISH ENOUGH FOR MY APPROVAL." Yeah obviously shut the fuck up. The point is you want to get the lads and chaps and fellas back home fired up. To do that, you need to be competitive. And to be competitive in international baseball, you gotta spread the roster spots around. If that means a couple Americans hit in the middle of your batting order, so be it. We got bigger things going on here fellas. It's gonna take the whole village so maybe clean up the attitude over there for a minute.
- Randy Arozarena is my favorite player the AL East now
- The Japanese media calls were electric all tournament. Here's a brief taste:
- The TV's over there were certainly humming:
- I love that fans can argue about whether or not it matters. We'll be so far up each other's asses we won't even realize that just about every single player wants to be there. This is one of those times you should probably just take the butcher's word for it. The cut of meat is nice and thick. The World Baseball Classic is a great tournament.
- It should be played before the season. It shouldn't be played more frequently and we don't need expansion or contraction. The wheels of change turn slow. The goal is that one day it's a true global tournament.
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- Is the World Cup that more competitively balanced? I don't think so. Give me 5 teams that could've won it and 99/100 World Cups end with one of those 5 teams winning it this year. I could be completely wrong. But thinking hard, it certainly feels like the WBC is no more unbalanced than a World Cup. And there's pussies out there that have thoroughly enjoyed using that as a reference point to say the WBC sucks. Fuck those guys.
- Couple more things.
- Still thinking about the Czech Republic. It's about 4:30pm local time over there so most of their team is about to finish up a long day of work. The high school teaching relief pitcher is probably grading a batch of unenthusiastic essays about the historical long term impacts of cultural exchanges amongst landlocked European countries. When really, he should be hitting fungos and working on a back field in Surprise, Arizona or an equivalent. Nope. The Czechs are back to normal life and I'll always respect them significantly more because of this tournament.
- Yoshida is gonna be a monster in Boston. There's a play on words with the Green Monster here but I don't want to go down that path. I just want to very seriously say that he is outstanding.
- Vinnie Pasquantino is my guy. Ride or die. Thank you for vlogging Team Italy and taking us behind the scenes of the WBC. Here's the 1st of 5 episodes we recorded together:
- Lastly - great stream with the boys last night and I mean great. Thank you to Wild Thing Castellani for going a full 9 with me. Hubbs and RDT as well, along with Allan from the Dozen. You may remember him as the guy Brandon Walker coerced into behind-the-scenes access to other matches. Lotta dugout talk which is a good thing.
Follow along for future references here. You should know by now most of my blogs end with requests. That will not stop.