Apparently baseball players throw too many fastballs. It will take smarter people than I am to figure out if this Means Something or it’s merely interesting. It’s been a long day, however, and at this point interesting is enough for me:
In the case of baseball, we observe every pitch thrown in the major leagues over the period 2002-2006 - a total of more than 3 million pitches. For football, we observe every play in the National Football League for the years 2001-2005 - over 125,000 plays . . . The results obtained from analyzing the football and baseball data are quite similar. In both cases, we find clear deviations from minimax play, as evidenced by a failure to equalize expected payoffs across different actions played as part of mixed strategies, and with respect to negative serial correlation in actions . . . In baseball, pitchers appear to throw too many fastballs, i.e., batters systematically have better outcomes when thrown fastballs versus any other type of pitch.
Game theory, schmame theory. Maybe ballplayers just want to give him the heat and announce their presence with authority. Didja ever think of that? And maybe those suckers simply teed off on ‘em like they knew they were gonna throw a fastball.
(thanks to Pete Toms for the link)