[frankbmd]

Some of you are old enough to have experience playing simulated season replays with APBA or Stratomatic dice driven board games or both. Some of you may still do.

If you were a stat freak in doing so, compiling statistics in the ante-computer era required time, diligence and was fraught with unintentional errors.

For example after several hundred games, you would discover that the sum of the pitchers’ strikeouts was different than the sum of the batters’ strikeouts.

If you were obsessive compulsive and encountered such an inconsistency, you could spend hours reviewing hand scored game sheets to find your error.

At the end of a season those linked stats between batters and pitchers just had to match.

Older real baseball records have been corrected years later with the advent of retrosheet and other computer assisted compilations. But if one returns to the nineteenth century or Negro League baseball many games are not completely recorded.

You could also consider vintage minor league stats, which can be virtually non-existent or at least not preserved. Finding even a correct roster for the 1909 Rocky Mount Railroaders is a challenge.

Let’s define major leagues as the American and National League only without nineteenth century stats from other AL precursors.

So here’s the bet. Using any sources available for all major league games only, do you think you can prove that the total number of pitchers’ strikeouts equals the total number of batters’ strikeouts and that that number is correct. I say “No”.

Wanna bet?