THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Remind me to tell that to all my Pirate fan friends.

Very cool stuff here. Thanks for the link.

Couldn’t help but notice that the chart stops just short of addressing the 105 year old Cubs fans who are still waiting.

assuming your team has a 1/30 chance of winning each year…

some fans don’t have that luxury, so don’t go telling your pirate’s fan friends just yet.

Just curious, how closely does Patriot’s calculations line up with the last 100 years in baseball (accounting for # of teams, if possible)?

Not a terribly important question, but inquiring minds want to know!

Speaking as a Pirate fan myself, many of their problems are attributable to the mistakes of front offices that are not there anymore.  They seemingly had no plan for baseball past 2008 or so, and as a result it’s taken the current regime a few years to build up a legitimate farm system.  The systemic issues from playing in a small market are real, but they were magnified by the mistakes of old front offices.  Now attendance is up 10% despite being down league-wide, and it seems like that might continue if this club sniffs even more winning.

Sure they still have an uphill battle, and maybe they won’t have as much as a 1/30 chance every year.  However, the laughing stock days appear to be behind them for the time being.

Obviously, the historical record shows that titles are not evenly distributed among teams.  Even if all teams truly had an equal chance of winning in a given season, we would expect to see some deviation.  I’m not sure that any team other than the Yankees is a true outlier.

@Patriot/7:
The Yankees are definitely an outlier, but I suspect there might be others (pre-2008, the Phillies would probably have been).

I don’t know the numbers, but you just gave me something fun to check.

I was wrong about there being other outliers.  The Yankees stand alone.

Assume that each team in a given league has an equal chance of winning the pennant and that each team in the World Series has an equal chance of winning.

Then, of the teams that have never won a World Series, the lowest probabilities to have never won are the Rangers and Astros (14% each).

The probability of a given one of the original 8 NL teams having never won a World Series is 0.3%, and the probability of a given such team winning exactly one is 2.0%.  The original 16 teams have each won at least 2 World Series.

So there are no real outliers on the low end.

I thought the Marlins (2 WS wins, 0.55 expected) might be an outlier, but they had an 8.5% chance of exactly two wins and about a 1.5% chance of more.

That leaves the Yankees and the Cardinals.  Above 2 WS wins, I gave up on doing the exact calculation based on the number of teams in each league in each year.  Instead, for the Yankees, I calculated an upper bound for the probability of 27+ wins (8 AL teams each year), a lower bound (14 AL teams each year), and a best guess (the arithmetic mean of 10.3 AL teams each year).

Upper bound for the probability: 2.8 x 10^-10.
Lower bound: 7.0 x 10^-16.
Best guess: 9.2 x 10^-13.
We’re below the uncertainty on the (g-2) experiment here.

The Cardinals are .  The average number of teams in the NL is almost the same (10.2 compared to 10.3), so I just looked further up on the Yankees’ chart.
Upper bound (10+ wins): 12.7%.
Lower bound: 0.5%.
Best guess: 3.3%.

The Cardinals are in the region where we could expect one team to wind up by chance.  Not really an outlier.

So it looks like my intuition was wrong.  The Yankees really are the only outlier.