from Amazon
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Momentum: tomorrow’s starting pitcher, or a flip of the coin?
Yowza.
Tyler at mchockey notes with derision some claims of momentum following fighting, by citing this claim:
They have determined that a fight has a positive effect on at least one team’s momentum in 76% of fights and increases the momentum for both teams about 1 out of every 4 fights (23%).
A reader at Tyler’s site helpfully notes:
1. 25% of the time, a fight makes no difference to the play of the game, or both teams experience a detrimental effect from fighting.
2. 25% of the time, both teams experience a positive effect from fighting.
3. 25% of the time, your team gets a net positive effect from fighting.
4. 25% of the time, your team get a net negative effect from fighting.
So, the claims being reported can be explained by simple random chance. i.e., flip of the coin.
The other claim, that there’s more “activity” following a fight can also be explained as:
If we know that most fights involve guys who get less ice time and we know that guys who play less tend to see fewer shots for and against when they are on the ice, we’d expect that shots would increase after a fight because the fight probably involved guys who are less likely to see shots taken by either team when they were on the ice, meaning that it’s more likely that guys who see more shots when they are on the ice will be coming over the boards in the next three minutes.
That is, whoever is NEXT on the ice determines the course of action. That is, it’s not that the players on the ice were somehow incentivized to take (and allow) more shots, but that the guys on the ice following a fight are going to be better than the guys on the ice who did the fighting. i.e., tomorrow’s starting pitcher
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I’ve lived through the bold claims with baseball from 10-15 years ago, and it looks like history is repeating itself.