6 hours ago, Squirrel said:

None ... ask a bassist in the Berlin Philharmonic  

Eh, i'll put in my time figuring as much as i can from first principles...

I bought a cheap plastic one years ago to start learning, but still haven't used it much, as the bass usually only gets pulled out for pit orchestras, or the occasional concert band i would be superfluous on tuba. I just recall it not being as automatic a win for ease of switching back and forth to pizz as i expected it to be...

6 hours ago, sampleSizeOfOne said:

How did 40 game starts become a thing?

 

Is this the team's best pitcher, and they could handle it, so they took the  mound every 4th or 5th day regardless of off days?

 

Today it's 5-man rotations. Divided into 162 games, that's about 32 starts per season.

Used to be 4-man rotations. Divided into 162, that gives you 40. Divided into the older 154-game schedule, that's 38 or so.

Of course in really olden days, back into the 19th century, you might have 3 or even 2 workhorses who handled the bulk of the chores.  But back then the schedules could be more erratic too, and the game was just played differently.

Anyway, major league teams settled into an every-fourth-game routine a lot quicker than people sometimes remember.  Well, remember reading about.