It turns out that I performed an experiment back in my days as a slow-pitch softball player. At that time my position was ‘rover’ – a tenth man who augmented the normal three who play the outfield in baseball. Depending on my whim, I would play ‘long’ – I line with the other outfielders – or ‘short’ – nearer the infield in a gap where I guessed a batter might want to drop a hit. It occurred to me that by randomly positioning myself inning-by-inning from one game to the next and measuring the oppositions success I might develop statistics that would show favor to either short or long as a general practice. Our team was originally sponsored by General Mills Chemical Technical Center, so my mates met this proposal with surprising enthusiasm. After all, our prospects for winning in our Class D (lowest level) league were never very good.
As Yogi Berra said, “We were overwhelming underdogs.”
One thing we could count on is that during any given inning, the opposition would be sure to achieve some hits, if not runs. However, it seemed likely that while playing short might cut off singles, it would lead to more doubles and triples from players knocking the softball over my head. Therefore my teammates and I agreed that total bases would be a good measure of success. Thus we counted a single as one, a double as two and so forth. (If you are not familiar with the game of baseball, see these simplified baseball rules from Wikipedia). Since opponents varied in their quality of play, I laid out a randomized block experiment game-by-game (results in first graph — the points labeled “2” represent two innings with the same total bases).