Town Team Baseball Minnesota's new Major League Baseball team, the Minnesota Twins, in 1961. Since the minimum number of players required to field a team for a single game with no substitutions is nine, then at least 7191 (and in actuality a much larger number) individuals participated in Minnesota townball in the peak year, 1950. Historically, Townball teams in Minnesota were divided into three classes: AA, A, and B. In Class AA leagues, teams were permitted three players from outside the local area, and salaries were unlimited; essentially, whatever the team's owners or shareholders could afford, they could pay. Because the unrestrained competition
Defense independent pitching statistics home runs, and walks (such as groundball rate), have been able to account for many of the BABIP differences that Tippet identified without reintroducing the noise from defense variability. Despite other criticisms, the work by McCracken on DIPS is regarded by many in the sabermetric community as the most important piece of baseball research in many years. As Jonah Keri wrote in 2012, "When Voros McCracken wrote his seminal piece on pitching and defense 11 years ago, he helped change the way people—fans, writers, even general managers—think about run prevention in baseball. Where once we used to throw most of