Earnshaw Cook did not have a baseball background. He was a metallurgical engineer and university professor who believed that a healthy dose of advanced mathematics could improve his favorite sport.
He made his case in Percentage Baseball, a 1964 book that was utterly unlike anything that had come before.
Portions of Cook’s manuscript were prescient. He denigrated the statistical value of runs batted in. He proved that a sacrifice bunt actually decreases a team’s chances of scoring a run. And he suggested that a reliever should be a club’s initial pitcher, serving as what we now call an opener. (“Always start a relief pitcher, and remove him for a pinch hitter on his first turn at bat,” Cook advised.)
But much of Percentage Baseball was incomprehensible to the layman. The book was crammed with graphs, tables, and abstruse calculations. This, for example, was the way that Cook explained his aversion to sacrifices: “Solution of the equations for average play (DX = .0890) illustrates the deleterious effects of the sacrifice bunt upon the expected number of total runs scored as p.SHS-values decrease from an impossible 1.00 to .50.”
Whew.
One of Cook’s final topics, which he addressed roughly 300 pages into the book, was the importance of luck. The regular season was long enough that the best team usually won each league’s pennant, he contended in those division-less days, but the seven-game World Series was so short that victory was largely a matter of chance.
“The World Series is indeed a myth of true supremacy,” wrote Cook. He buttressed his point with 12 tables and three graphs.
The only solution was to make the series longer. If Major League Baseball wanted to be 80 percent certain that the better ballclub emerged victorious, Cook calculated that it would need to expand the World Series to 252 games. If 99 percent certainty were the goal, the series would have to run 1,934 games.
So what about the regular season, which was anywhere from 23 to 40 times longer than any World Series? One could only imagine the enormous length required to make it truly accurate, perhaps tens of thousands of games!
But that’s where Cook confounded expectations. He estimated that a regular-season schedule in the range of 79 to 133 games would be adequate — fewer than the 162 games that the majors played then and now.
Can I explain the mathematical reasons why the World Series should be lengthened, while the season itself could safely be shortened? Not at all. But you’re welcome to wade through Cook’s use of Pascal’s Triangle, his calculations of probable success proportions, and his tables of changing progressions.
Best of luck to you.
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I cite Earnshaw Cook’s book because it raises an interesting question: Why does Major League Baseball play so many games?
The big leagues in basketball and hockey both confine themselves to 82-game seasons, half of baseball’s mammoth schedule. And football limits itself to 17 contests per team, roughly one-tenth the size of MLB’s slate.
But baseball went big at an early age, adopting a 154-game schedule way back in 1904. And it went bigger during the expansion round of 1961-1962, boosting the standard to 162 games.
Some owners would have preferred to go even higher. They briefly got their way in August 1946, when both leagues voted to inflate the schedule by nine percent from 154 to 168 games. Their motivation probably won’t surprise you.
"The increased income to be secured from seven home and seven road games will be considerable even for clubs which are down in the race. It will represent large amounts of increased income for contending clubs," said a secret report prepared by Larry MacPhail, the co-owner of the New York Yankees.
The Sporting News quickly went on the attack, warning that the 168-game schedule “would provide a glut of competition, tire the fans, fatigue the players, and arouse the strong resentment of the press.” A substantial number of players — and a few owners (including Tom Yawkey) — joined the protest. The increase was quietly scrapped before ever being enacted.
But this sudden reversal didn’t deter some of the minor leagues. The Pacific Coast League notably expanded its schedule in 1950 to 200 games — 200! — in hopes of bolstering attendance.
Manager Fred Haney of the Hollywood Stars predicted that the increase would be counterproductive and dangerous. “I have some players who have reached the point where they no longer can play the required number of games on our schedule,” he warned. But the PCL’s owners persisted.
Oakland won the league’s 1950 title with a record of 118-82. But total attendance actually dropped 15 percent, despite the bloated supply of 100 home games per team. The PCL hastily trimmed its 1951 schedule by 16 percent.
These episodes make it clear — as if fans and other observers didn’t already know — that most baseball executives have no understanding of the Law of Scarcity or the Law of Unintended Consequences.
There have been a few exceptions down the years, of course.
Chicago Cubs president William Veeck Sr. — father of the Hall of Fame owner — called in 1933 for a shortening of the schedule. "It is a fact that from July 5 to the middle of August, major-league baseball is in the doldrums,” he told a reporter. “These are the game's dog days, so far as public interest is concerned in a sport that runs for so long — too long, if I may express another conviction of mine."
Veeck Sr. wasn’t the renegade or maverick that his son would become. He was a respected member of the baseball establishment. Yet his calls for a compacted schedule and for interleague play annoyed mossbacks like Clark Griffith of the Washington Senators. “We are not going in for any hippodrome stuff,” Griffith snorted. “We're going on just the way we are. That's all I've got to say.”
The schedule remained at 154 games.
But Earnshaw Cook’s calculations suggest that a slate of, say, 100 games might actually be sufficient. This proposal is buttressed by an examination of 2022’s regular-season results.
I sliced into last year’s standings at the 100-game mark, determining the playoff qualifiers at that point. A few flaws are admittedly inherent in such an artificial cutoff, including imbalances between each club’s home and road games, as well as variations in the number of games between divisional foes. Yet the results remain interesting — and instructive.
Ten of the 12 playoff teams at the 100-game mark also qualified at the 162-game terminus. Only Milwaukee and Minnesota fell out of the postseason lineup over the final 62-game stretch, replaced by St. Louis and Cleveland.
That means the majors played an additional 930 games (62 per team, multiplied by 30 teams, divided by two teams per game) merely to swap a pair of playoff positions.
One of the additions, the Cardinals, was instantly eliminated after losing both games in its wild-card series against Philadelphia. The other, the Guardians, advanced one step before falling in a divisional series with the Yankees. Neither club made it to a league championship series, let alone the World Series.
We don’t need Cook’s slide rule to calculate the competitive impact of those final 62 games, the bloated portion of 2022’s regular season. The answer, as we can tell by the results immediately above, was somewhere around zero.