The Shape of the Season
Major League Baseball is the highest tier of professional baseball in North America. Thirty franchises play a 162-game regular season from late March to the end of September. The top teams enter the postseason — a wild-card round, followed by best-of-five and best-of-seven series, culminating in the World Series in late October.
The Shape of a Game
Two teams of nine. Nine innings, each divided into a top and a bottom half. A pitcher throws to a batter from sixty feet six inches away. The batter tries to put the ball in fair play or to wait out four balls for a walk. Three outs end a half-inning. Whoever has scored more runs after nine innings wins; ties go to extra innings.
Why It Suits Prediction
Baseball is the most discretised sport in the world. Every pitch is an event. Every event is logged. Statcast, the modern tracking system, records spin rate, exit velocity, launch angle, and route efficiency to two decimal places. The data trail goes back to 1871. There is more clean signal per minute of game than in any other major sport.
Where Ra Operates
In the half-hour before first pitch, when lineups are confirmed, the weather stabilises, the home-plate umpire is announced, and the line stops moving. That is the window in which our nine engines deliberate and one verified call is written into the ledger.