While researching for my post about the information content of baseball scores I found some tantalizing links. I had wanted to know how often each score came up. From this I could calculate the entropy, the amount of information in the score. That’s the sum, taken over every outcome, of minus one times the frequency of that score times the base-two logarithm of the frequency of the outcome. And I couldn’t find that.
An article in The Washington Post had a fine lead, though. It offers, per the title, “the score of every basketball, football, and baseball game in league history visualized”. And as promised it gives charts of how often each number of runs has turned up in a game. The most common single-team score in a game is 3, with 4 and 2 almost as common. I’m not sure the date range for these scores. The chart says it includes (and highlights) data from “a century ago”. And as the article was posted in December 2014 it can hardly use data from after that. I can’t imagine that the 2015 season has changed much, though. And whether they start their baseball statistics at either 1871, 1876, 1883, 1891, or 1901 (each a defensible choice) should only change details.
Which is fine. I can’t get precise frequency data from the chart. The chart offers how many thousands of times a particular score has come up. But there’s not the reference lines to say definitely whether a zero was scored closer to 21,000 or 22,000 times. I will accept a rough estimate, since I can’t do any better.
I made my best guess at the frequency, from the chart. And then made a second-best guess. My best guess gave the information content of a single team’s score as a touch more than 3.5 bits. My second-best guess gave the information content as a touch less than 3.5 bits. So I feel safe in saying a single team’s score is about three and a half bits of information.
So the score of a baseball game, with two teams scoring, is probably somewhere around twice that, or about seven bits of information.
I have to say “around”. This is because the two teams aren’t scoring runs independently of one another. Baseball doesn’t allow for tie games except in rare circumstances. (It would usually be a game interrupted for some reason, and then never finished because the season ended with neither team in a position where winning or losing could affect their standing. I’m not sure that would technically count as a “game” for Major League Baseball statistical purposes. But I could easily see a roster of game scores counting that.) So if one team’s scored three runs in a game, we have the information that the other team almost certainly didn’t score three runs.
This estimate, though, does fit within my range estimate from 3.76 to 9.25 bits. And as I expected, it’s closer to nine bits than to four bits. The entropy seems to be a bit less than (American) football scores — somewhere around 8.7 bits — and college basketball — probably somewhere around 10.8 bits — which is probably fair. There are a lot of numbers that make for plausible college basketball scores. There are slightly fewer pairs of numbers that make for plausible football scores. There are fewer still pairs of scores that make for plausible baseball scores. So there’s less information conveyed in knowing that the game’s score is.
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