This year I finally had some time to give the wild play charts a long-overdue overhaul. This is a brief summary of the changes for those who are interested.
After spending some time inputting the existing plays (along with estimated outcomes) into an Excel spreadsheet, I was able to confirm two longstanding suspicions I had about the charts, namely:
1) wild plays benefited the offense significantly — according to my calculations they resulted in a .477/.505/.783 slash line
2) there weren’t enough injury rolls for pitchers — according to my calculations the batter/pitcher split on injury rolls was 75%/25%
In order to reduce the offensive output of the wild plays I changed most of the plays which resulted in hits into plays which did not have a pre-determined result (e.g. IFR/OFR roll). After the changes, the wild plays have an estimated offensive output of .267/.332/.367.
Fixing the injury distribution was a bit more tricky, as it required adding a substantial number of new pitcher injury rolls. The solution I chose was to turn the 000-199 range previously reserved for SPECIALs into a required injury roll for pitchers (except with runners on base and a pitcher with W-WP symbol, as those additional wild pitches are still needed for accuracy purposes). As a result the SPECIAL wild play chart has been removed and some symbols have been phased out (e.g. HOME/ROAD). Despite the loss of some “flavor”, I think that most people will be happier with the streamlined resolution, given the confusion that frequently resulted when multiple SPECIALs were involved. The batter/pitcher split on injury rolls is now effectively 50/50.
If there are specific plays you’d like to see added to the wild play charts, feel free to leave a comment.
As much as I appreciate the 50/50 distribution of injuries from pitchers to hitters, I’d be interested to know what the MLB distribution of injuries is. I assume (always dangerous) that it is closer to the 50/50 than the previous 75/25, but it makes me wonder.
I’ve got the injury data we used for the previous two card sets, I broke it down for batters/pitchers:
year pos # days
2009 bat 159 7062
2009 pit 154 8396
-
2008 bat 170 8055
2008 pit 165 8509
About equal numbers, but predictably the pitcher injuries are longer.
Compare this to actual IBL injury days (results from the old wild play charts):
year pit bat
2010 578 3319
2009 866 3093
2008 659 3280
2007 792 3183
Is there a printable version of the wild play chart floating around somewhere?
All of the charts are in PDF format and can be found via the Downloads page.
[…] injury system I’ve followed up last year’s improvements to the wild play charts by creating a new injury system which will go into effect this year. I’m posting a brief […]