Friday, November 4, 2016

Are Lower-Scoring Worlds "Better"?

As my hamster-mind attempted to distract itself from the task at hand (Season 36 previews - yes, we'll have them this year) and marveled at Minnesota's defensive prowess (122/11 on +/- plays last year, continuing a long run of 100+ good plays and bad plays in the teens/twenties), I started wondering about the correlation between "Good" (meaning a high level of play, I think) worlds and scoring.

I've long thought that as worlds got "better" ( and I'm not real sure what I mean here...it could be that I mean "as the owners of a world get more experienced"), they manage their pitching better and play better defense (and sacrifice a little offense here and there), and scoring goes down.

So I took a look at 7 private worlds I consider to be "High-level" (either from personal experience, reputation or your recommendation) and noted runs per team for their latest completed season (the worlds were Major Leagues, Kinsella, Hobbs, NCAA, Mantle, Moonlight Graham, NCAA II).

Then I did the same thing for 7 public worlds (Are there only 7 public worlds now?):  Aaron, Clarkson, Minor Leagues, Musial, Puckett, Ryan, Williams.

The average RPT for the private worlds was 728, with a high of 767 (NCAA) and a low of 690 (Major Leagues and Moonlight Graham).

The average RPT for the public worlds was 813, with a high of 867 (Aaron) and a low of 744 (Minor Leagues).  All the other public worlds averaged over 800 RPT.

Just for the heck of it, I compared the average +/- plays in Mantle (at 729, the closest to the average RPT of our private worlds) to those in Musial (at 817, the closest to the average RPT of our public worlds).

Mantle teams averaged 69 + plays and 34 - plays.  Musial teams averaged 55 good plays and 42 bad plays.

Maybe this is self-evident and maybe it means nothing. Subjectively (as an owner in both worlds) I'd say Major Leagues and Hobbs are about on par in quality of play, but Hobbs teams outscored their counterparts here in their recently-completed seasons by 75 runs per team (that said, I've also subjectively thought of Major Leagues as a pitcher-dominated world and Hobbs as a slugger's paradise).

Is there a point here?  Do worlds score less as they get "better".   What else affects scoring?  Interested in your comments.


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