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| May-03-12 | | Jim Bartle: Hold on a second. Pitcher for Team A has a birthday, 100% probability. Chance that pitcher for Team B is 1/365. So I'd say 1 in every 365 major league games feature starters with the same birthday (ignoring birth year right now). There are 2,430 games each year, so that would mean an average of 7 or 8 such games a year. What I'd like to know is how many times the starting pitchers were born on the same day, in the same place, and to the same mother. Unfortunately the existence of a team called the Twins makes this tough via Google. And by the way, have any real twins every played for the Twins? |
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| May-03-12 | | Jim Bartle: Here's a fun interview with Bill Lee from a few years ago: http://www.baseball-almanac.com/pla... Tidbits include that he ended up at a celebration party with Tigers fans after Detroit beat his Red Sox in the final game of the 1972 season to win the division, and a strange description of a double play in 1972 (http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/...) even though there was already one out. |
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May-03-12
 | | WannaBe: I missed the fact that the 2 pitchers are also playing that day. That does throw a curve ball into the equation, any pitcher(es) born outside of the season would diminish the pool. |
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| May-03-12 | | Jim Bartle: Right, my mistake completely. I was just thinking that the two pitchers had the same birthday, not that they were also pitching against each other on their birthdays. First, of course (!), cut my first calcultion approximately in half, since only half the dates would occur during baseball season. Then divide by the number of days in the baseball season. So the chance of two pitchers with the same birthday facing each other would appear to occur (by chance) only once every fifty years or so. |
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May-03-12
 | | Phony Benoni: Apparently, it's a first:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/sport... |
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May-03-12
| | Phony Benoni: Again, I'm not quite sure of the math here. In fact, maybe we should unleash this on the Geniuses Over at the Stumpers Page. But just to make a rough estimate. Within a group of 30 people, there will be two with the same birthday about 72% of the time (I think). Call it three out of four just to make things easy. So, out of four days with full schedules, there will be two starting pitchers with the same birthday three times. Now, what are the chances those two pitchers would meet? My uneducated guess is 1 out of 29, so we multiply 3/4 by 1/29 to get 3/116, which is close enough to 3/120 to call it once every forty days or roughly four times a year. Again, I'm just making it easy rather than precise. Now, how often will such a matchup occur on the pitchers' birthdays? Now I think you have to multiply by 1/365, which gets you 1 out of every 14,600 days. Figure 162 days in a baseball season, and that works out to about 90 baseball years. Which is undoubtedly too optimistic for at least two reasons: (1) league play divides the number of chances for birthday boys to meet; (2) we're assuming 30 starting pitchers for 162 days, which in the 140 or so years of professional baseball is far too high. All things considered, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Elias is right and it's never happened before. I also wouldn't be surprised if my math is wrong. |
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May-03-12
| | Phony Benoni: And if you want to do some research, maybe this will help: http://www.baseball-reference.com/f...
By the way, I wasn't aware that Moose Skowrown died a week ago. |
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| May-03-12 | | Jim Bartle: Here's my take:
50% chance that the home team's starter has a birthday during the season. (Whoa, Adam Dunn just hit an incredible blast. He might miss a lot, but when he connects the ball travels.) .27% chance the visiting team's pitcher has the same birthday. .27% chance that they're playing on their birthdays.
Multiply the three together and you get the chance of it happening: .000365%. Another way to look at it: once in 266,450 games. |
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May-03-12
| | WannaBe: I am not going to pretend that I know statistics, here are a few more thoughts... 2 pitchers may share a same birthday during season, but the teams have an off day. Pitchers may not be facing one another.
One of the pitcher may end up on DL the week before.
They are born mid-Oct. and can only meet in the World Series. I think the odds are slim. |
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May-03-12
| | Phony Benoni: <JB> That works out to about 110 seasons, and my 90 was a conservative estimate. In any event, it's not surprising that it hasn't happened before. |
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| May-04-12 | | Jim Bartle: Have twins ever pitched against each other (not on their birthday)? I know brothers have faced each other many times, but twins? |
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May-04-12
| | Phony Benoni: <JB> If this is still accurate, apparently not: http://www.twinstuff.com/twinsmlb.htm |
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| May-04-12 | | Jim Bartle: A twins story in tennis:
In the 80s a player (maybe Ion Tiriac) lost a match to a new guy on the tour, Tim Gullikson, a right-hander. A few weeks later he played Tim's identical twin brother Tom, a left-hander, and lost to him as well. Afterward Tiriac (or whoever it was) said, "I know I'm not the best player in the world, but I'll be damned if there's anybody who can beat me playing with either hand." |
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May-04-12
| | Phony Benoni: While Yankees-bashing seems to be the National Pastime, I don't see how any thoughtful baseball fan can consider Mariano Rivera's injury with anything but sadness. No career should end in this way, but to lose a sure Hall-of-Famer--and, by all accounts, a good and decent man--is a tragedy. |
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| May-04-12 | | Jim Bartle: I didn't know Rivera had been injured.
Really sorry to hear it, the guy has a lot of class. |
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May-04-12
| | WannaBe: <Jim Bartle: I didn't know Rivera had been injured.
Really sorry to hear it, the guy has a lot of class.> He's a Yankee, how can he have class? Much less 'lot of class'? =) |
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| May-04-12 | | playground player: <Phony Benoni> It's the coarsening of our culture. |
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| May-04-12 | | technical draw: This is a wiki article ref Rivera's injury. It's all over for Mariano. Next stop, Cooperstown. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anteri... |
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| May-04-12 | | Jim Bartle: WannaBe: The Yankees as a team may not be a paragon of class, but quite a few individual Yankees have or had it. |
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| May-04-12 | | technical draw: If you want to see a Yankee fan with class just look at me. (hold on let me get this booger off the keyboard) Now, as I was saying Yankee fans have a lot of class. |
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| May-04-12 | | technical draw: Interesting tidbit:
Roberto Clemente hit the only walk-off inside-the-park grand slam in baseball history. Clemente's 3rd base coach instructed him to stop at 3rd, but Clemente ran through to score the winning run. |
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May-04-12
| | WannaBe: <technical draw> Yes, they have a lot of class... Remidial typing, remidial math, remidial base-running, remidial english... and of course, remidial spilling!! =) |
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| May-04-12 | | Jim Bartle: Clemente hit that home run in 1956. He must have been called Robertito then. I guess he was 21 or 22. http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/... Unless he was totally sure of scoring, strategy says Clemente should have stayed on third. He'd already driven in three to tie the score, and he'd have been on third with no outs and Dale Long and Frank Thomas coming up. That leaves really good odds he'd score. |
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May-04-12
| | Phony Benoni: I'm sorry, but I cannot call an inside-the-park home run a "walk-off" hit. |
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| May-04-12 | | technical draw: <Phony> Lol! |
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