The Brewers Dominate Opponents in… Time of Possession?
Six-tenths of the way through the season, the Brewers stand out as one of the teams who has dominated in an aspect of baseball that is hardly ever talked about: possession rate.
In basketball and American football, time of possession is a carefully tracked team statistic. It’s a stand-in for overall quality of play and control of the action, meant to help one discern when the scoreboard isn’t telling the whole story. In world football, a graphic pops up fairly often to tell the viewer which team has had possession for a greater percentage of the time. This is valuable information, forming a natural avatar for the physical game.
Because those games are played end-to-end, with each team defending a goal and trying to advance the ball toward the other one, we naturally (and usually accurately) envision greater time of possession for one side as more time spent in the other team’s end, where they have a relatively strong chance to score and the other team has virtually none.
Our brains don’t naturally map time of possession onto baseball in the same way, because baseball is not a linear game. It’s played in circles, with each side defending the same territory in their turns, and there’s no clock on the game (save the countdown clock that is the number of outs left for a team, after they begin with 27).
Yet, it matters. After all, whereas all those other sports contain at least some means by which to immediately convert defense to offense within a single play, baseball is rigid. Only one side is allowed to score at a time, so “possession” is more valuable there than in any of the other three sports considered here.
