#baseball has the best sports naps (tho football sports naps are also good)

[coffee-at-annies]

Well this post crossed my dash again and my brain was like what if I went on another unhinged rant/infodump about how baseball and hockey are different? And well gestures here we are.

Today on these two sports are different, we are going to talk about game flow and we are going to talk about offense and defense. The original post was for hockey fans unfamiliar with baseball. I’m gonna try to make this coherent for people who aren’t familiar with either but who knows it’s the xkcd average familiarity comic.

So in hockey you’ve got a standard sized rectangular rink separated into two zones with a goal on each end. The zone with your team’s goalie is your team’s defensive zone and the zone with the opposing goalie is the offensive zone. This means that at any point in time depending on where the puck is your team may be on offense or defense and game flow transitions between those two states. Teams can often get stuck in their own [defensive] zone or things like power plays can lead to a lot of [offensive] zone time. Keeping up with the play requires fans to be aware of what zone the puck is in. There’s the neutral zone which is just the middle of the rink and isn’t important at this time except for like extra rules and the blue lines re: zone entries and offsides. Not important here.

So for hockey you’ve got a continuous game flow of offense to defense to offense etc. It’s not always back and forth that explicitly but at any point the puck can take a bounce out of a zone and shift the flow of the game.

Baseball isn’t like that. Baseball is played on a diamond shaped field divided into infield and outfield. The infield is a dirt portion of the field consisting of 4 bases that make a square with 90ft on each side and a pitcher’s mound in the middle. The outfield is covered by grass and is considered everything between the two foul poles extending from the infield square up to the outfield fences. (Fun fact there’s no standardization about outfield sizes just minimum distances that aren’t even enforced that much).

You may be asking yourself is the infield the offensive zone and the outfield the defensive zone and the answer to that is yes both and neither. To explain that, I have to explain how baseball game flow works. Unlike hockey, where the game is broken up into three twenty minute periods and the game ends if there isn’t a tie at the final buzzer, baseball is divided into nine innings. The innings are then further broken up into half-innings called the top and bottom of the inning. The top of the inning (first half) will see the visiting team batting (offense) and the home team pitching/defending (defense). The bottom of an inning will see the reverse. A half inning ends when the team on offense gets three outs, thus each inning requires six outs. Idk how to define an out. There’s dozens of ways to get out and I would end up in the weeds trying to explain.

Also worth noting, unlike most major league sports, baseball doesn’t have a game clock. A half-inning takes however long it takes to get three outs. That can be two minutes and three batters or it can be twenty minutes and ten batters. It depends on who gets on base and how. MLB instituted a pitch clock to cut down on pitchers taking their damn time between pitches to force the average length of innings down.

Going back to game flow, there is a back and forth, but it’s dictated by the inning and the outs, not who has the baseball (the defensive team always has the baseball). So when a team is on offense they are batting. There’s no transition and putting pucks on the net. It’s all just batting. Players stand at home plate and try to hit the ball into play and then make it around the bases. In play is defined as between the two foul lines thus everywhere in play is the offensive zone for the batting team and the defensive zone for the defending team. Offensive players have to touch the bases to be considered safe on a play and the ball can go out of play in a couple scenarios (ground rule double, home run) and still be considered a fair ball, but that’s some basics.

I’m doing a bad job of explaining putting the ball into play because honestly most at-bats end up with an out. That’s the defense of it all. It starts with the pitcher, trying to throw the ball such that the offensive player (the batter) can’t hit it. I could get into the anatomy of an at-bat with balls and strikes and what the defense does if the ball is put into play, but I don’t know if that would be interesting when you can watch a baseball or softball game.

So I’ve talked about game flow and a little bit about offense and defense. What that looks like for baseball and I’ve kinda glossed over it for hockey but if you’ve got any passing familiarity with hockey or soccer/football then it’s probably familiar. The ways it’s different are the edge cases and I’m not explaining offsides or icing the same way I’m not explaining fouls vs hits. It’s not worth it.

Time to talk about offense and defense and what that means for players. In hockey, positions are split up into three categories, forwards, defense, and goalies. You can have 6 players on the ice at any time, generally in the configuration of one goalie, two defensemen (a d-pairing) and three forwards (a line). You can only have one goalie on the ice at any time but any combination of forwards and defense. At any point anyone on the bench can sub in for anyone on the ice (called a line change) so long as you don’t go over that six player maximum otherwise it’s a penalty (too many men on the ice). Baseball rosters are split into pitchers and hitters. Pitchers are split into the starting rotation and the bullpen. Hitters are usually divided by position but mostly it’s just what nine players are in the batting order for this game and whoever is currently pitching. In hockey, anyone who is on the bench can go into the game and everyone else is out of luck. This is good in that anyone can sub in at any time, but bad if someone gets injured during a game as the team will be forced to just play on with one less person. There’s exceptions for goalies and the ebug and we’re not going there. For baseball there’s nine positions on the field and nine spots in the batting order and that’s it. Technically since we don’t force pitchers to bat anymore there’s nine or ten active players at any time — pitcher, catcher, four infielders, three outfielders, and the designated hitter (who can be the pitcher but isn’t usually - Ohtani georg is an outlier). You can sub in someone from the bench/dugout at any time but they have to play the rest of the game. This is nice in case of injuries or if you gave your best hitter a day off and now need him to come in and hit a game winning home run.

The most common substitution in a baseball game however is the pitcher. Throwing balls well is hard. It can fuck up your elbow like nothing else. Baseball has a surgery named after a player because this specific elbow injury and resulting surgery is so common. As such, pitching is a committee job. A starting pitcher will usually pitch between four to six innings (throwing sixty to one hundred pitches) and then the bullpen will take over one inning (three to four outs, usually about nine to thirty pitches) at a time. A team’s closer is their bullpen pitcher who is the best at getting outs and usually pitches the ninth inning. Hitters all have a defensive position on the field except the designated hitter (DH) whose job it is to bat for the pitcher. I think I’m getting into the weeds of specifics again.

So going back to the original post that was complaining about picking up hockey players and dropping them into baseball. Pitching is a defensive-only position that is frequently done by committee. Hockey forwards are generally on the ice to make plays and score goals. They do backcheck and play defense as a matter of game flow but they are primarily on ice to score. Thus it does not make sense to cast prolific goal scorers like Sidney Crosby, Alex Ovechkin, or Connor McDavid as a pitcher when pitchers do not even play offense. It’s worth talking about what type of defense they play on the ice and how that would shake out to a defensive position on the field (or as the DH because they don’t have to play defense — that’s where I’m putting Ovi) but it requires an understanding of how an inning functions regarding defense and different play styles at the different bases. Your best forward is going to put the team on their back and score. Your best pitcher is going to put the team on their back and defend. Pitchers can get shutouts the way goalies do. It is a purely defensive position.

So yeah, you can compare shooting styles to blaseball pitches but it makes way more sense to compare shots to hitting styles than it does pitches.

Ummm @guentzel tagging you since your post was first. Feel free to ignore.