> I honestly don't understand why you resist the idea that luck has an > implication on the playing field. Anyone with any experience in _any_ > competitive activity will tell you, very simply, that the best person > doesn't always win and that sometimes it's just luck that determines the > outcome. I agree completely but I don't think persistent patterns can be ascribed to luck. With regard to sports I don't think it lucky that Michael Jordon got his hands on the ball at key moments and made key shots. Same with Larry Bird. Same with the current Yankees. In medicine we try to determine whether something is effective by using simple statistical tools like the student t test. I would apply this to baseball in this way: I would ask the question "What are the chances that the Yankeess record in the playoffs over the past 5 years is due to luck". You could compare the Yankees record to other teams in the playoffs say the braves. I believe that you would find that the chances that the Yankess success was due to luck alone was too small to be acceptable. At that point you have to search for a true cause.
The Yankees were > the best team in the league in 1998, right? So if you were right, they > should have won 162 games. Not every game of course. But the majority of their games. But they didn't. If Jeffrey Maier, Chuck > Knoblauch, and Eric Gregg can't convince you that sometimes the better team is going >to lose a baseball team to a worse one, I have no idea what could. My point has been that if these things hadn't happened the Yankees would have won anyway. That is, if a rigorous analysis rules out luck to reaonable degree of certainty than the specific events are unimportant. > Sometimes the ball bounces funny. Sometimes it bounces in ordinary fashion > but a player makes a mistake, and even that is usually just luck (defined as > the impact of random variables on outcomes). The rate at which any player > gets a hit is indistinguishable from random chance, for example. Each > at-bat is essentially an independent event where different outcomes have > different probabilities based largely on the underlying abilities of the > pitcher, hitter, and fielders. But the particular outcome of any at-bat is > usually just luck. But over the course of many encounters luck has to even out. The better batter has a higher batting average or OPS because he is better. If he has a 40% chance of getting on base it is more likely that he will succeed than someone with a 30% chance. That is what the stats are all about. Do you really not believe that random chance has a > significant influence on the outcome of something as closely balanced as a playoff >baseball game? One game chance may decide; many games - if a consistent pattern emerges than this is no longer luck. You may not be able to define why a thing is occuring but you can say it is not luck. Now of course I don't know that my tests would show that the Yankees weren't just lucky but it would be interesting to find out. These are actually quite interesting problems intellectually. You are dealing with the statistics of small numbers and you have to take into account the collection of data over a long time (any team could go on a streak where it wins a lot of games in a row or 60-70% wins in a month or so; look at the Twins. That is "luck" or more accurately the normal lumpiness of events. (you don't flip head tail head tail you flip head head head head tail heat tail tail etc) But to sustain this sort of record discontinuously over many years strikes me as much harder; maybe I am wrong here but this is my intuitive sense of things) > Gautam
