mlb's shortened season -- my decision deferred

Maybe I should wait until that first pitch. I don't want to jinx it.

To some extent I wouldn't care if there's no baseball season this year. I stopped following the sport after the 1994 strike. Not that I've been making any kind of big statement or anything; I just kind of lost interest. I guess I kind of cared when it came to the Yankees and the Mets in the post-season. But during the regular season? Eh...whatevs.

But there is one way that I have continued to follow baseball. There are statistics that I like to track, and I look forward to updating them every fall. The first thing I started tracking was teams' wins and losses. This is something that started with a discussion in college -- wouldn't it be interesting to see a graph of every team's cumulative games over .500 by year. For most people the answer is no. But for me, a resounding yes. At the time, with the tools available to me, such a graph wasn't a realistic undertaking. But a few decades later, it's easy. And I've added some other related statistics -- total wins and rankings in terms of wins, for example. And I have variations in which I group teams by their location, or state, or nickname.* After I updated these statistics last year, I blogged about it here. In that post I focused on rankings wins. But the file I linked to includes the cumulative-games-over-500 graphs as well. If MLB cancels the season, then I miss out on the fun of updating the stats.

But more significant is the effect on my statistics regarding home runs.. The most recent post relevant to that is here. I like to keep track of the records (and who holds them) for most home runs in an n-year span (for positive integers n). Like the cumulative wins tracking, no season means no updating at year-end. And with this statistic I was really looking forward to improving my process by using a downloadable database.

But it's bigger than that. Whenever I've talked or written about these statistics, I have used the words "year" and "season" interchangeably. "Most home runs in a 5-year span" meant the same as "most home runs in a 5-season span." If there's no 2020 season, then I have to decide whether I'm tracking n-year or n-season spans. And I don't want to make that decision.

Fingers crossed that I won't have to.

*Yeah...I'm loads of fun at parties.