Heads up! Long post with pictures (and graphs!)
@PAPA_Doug: Thanks for checking on the sheets.
@bkerins : I won’t be winning Pinburgh next year, so I would be very happy to receive a consolation prize of 3 reams of paper worth of scores.
I certainty agree with @wizcat that it’s situational depending on the match, and I think that’s what makes it so interesting. You can use factors like “points earned” to get context behind the scores you are seeing.
Here’s a chart from weeks 8 and 9 of the NFL Season, sorted by points scored.
If you add in a color to represent wins and losses, it becomes that much more interesting. The Giants scored 49 against New Orleans and still lost, but Seattle score 13 and won.
In the NFL, they play until the whistle.
However, in Pinball the final player in a group may not have to play ball 3, or they might play until they win and stop. Sports that are like this are baseball and cricket. In baseball, you skip the 9th inning if you have enough runs, or you might play the final inning and have a walk-off where at that point, you stop trying to earn runs because you’ve won. Cricket is similar in that the team batting second either runs out of wickets, or they earn enough runs to stop playing. Baseball is (usually) low scoring, so I took data from the 2015 Cricket 20Twenty matches and noted which wins were the result of earning enough runs so that they stop playing (“win by wickets”).
So in Pinball, it’s a similar concept. If Player #4 wins the match, they ether did so by not playing Ball 3, or by winning on Ball 3 (a walk-off). If we know the position of the player, we can designate the win as such.
That all being said, I scraped the data from A Finals this year because we know all of those pieces of information.
Here’s a straight ahead one: Nitro Groundshaker
Aliens, where Karl had a crushing score, and we see a few either plunged balls or “walk-offs” where those scores could have been higher had the ball been played out.
Family Guy, where you wonder how many points Keith would have gotten had he played Ball 3:
Batman, where the top three scores were in the same group:
With the full data set, we can also look at other pieces of information like incoming IFPA Rank, Round #, Division, Affiliation, etc.
If people found these charts interesting, I can post pictures of all the A Finals games along with the Excel sheet.
