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In Baseball, It's All Dumb Luck
By Raam Wong
Copyright © 2007 Albuquerque Journal; Journal Staff Writer
The storied laboratory that developed the world's first atomic bomb may have hit upon a new discovery: why the Chicago Cubs have so much trouble getting to the World Series.
Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists have concluded that Major League Baseball would require many more games each season to ensure that only the best teams— not sometimes just the luckiest— make it to the final rounds.
For instance, ensuring that the best team comes out on top of the league 85 percent of the time would require 10,000 games per season, said study co-author Eli Ben-Naim, a Red Sox fan.
That's a lot of tendinitis, and Ben-Naim says he isn't advocating a year-round season or a dozen more channels of ESPN.
"Scientists sometimes come up with answers that might not be terribly practical," said Ben-Naim, whose study on competitiveness in league sports will be published this month in the journal Physical Review E.
He said a more realistic approach would be scheduling a couple of preliminary rounds to eliminate the lousy teams before the regular season, according to the researchers. Fewer teams means fewer games that need to be played.
Ben-Naim and colleague Nicholas Hengartner analyzed a century's worth of baseball records and simulated thousands of games to examine randomness in sports.
Their conclusion?
Outcomes of baseball games are pretty darned random, whether it's due to a stinker team having a stellar night or a fan reaching over the wall and snatching a fly ball.
In fact, in any given game, underdogs beat a more dominant team 44 percent of the time, the researchers found.
"There's a lot more randomness than we would've guessed," said Ben-Naim.
The study doesn't actually address why the Cubs haven't won a World Series since 1908. They last played in one in 1945. (Cubs fans, take heart: your team moved into first place in its division on Wednesday.)
But perhaps Chicago's lovable losers have been victimized from time to time by "randomness" as much as their own on-the-field ineptitude.
Remember when Cubs fan Steve Bartman reached from the stands to grab a foul ball in the 2003 playoffs, keeping an outfielder from making the play and starting a chain of events that led to yet another Cubs debacle?
Statistically speaking, a 162-game regular season is too short, according to Ben-Naim. He says the best team would be expected to rack up the most wins only 30 percent of the time.
Teams would have to hit the field a lot more to sufficiently diminish the role randomness— or dumb luck— plays in determining the champion.
As for the playoffs, Ben-Naim said they could be improved by making each series the best of 11 games, rather the best of five or seven.
The researchers didn't set out to study baseball statistics, nor is their project part of Democratic Rep. Tom Udall's recent call to diversify the lab's mission.
So why are Los Alamos researchers spending time and money worrying about the fates of sports teams?
Ben-Naim says he studies "random motions in complex materials," such as how particles might interact in a gas.
Lately, he's been looking at how people might interact and compete in a society, whether on Wall Street or in sports.
Social dynamics, he says, is an increasingly important field of study that can be applied to understanding terrorist cells, battlefield tactics or other matters of national security.
And sports offer a treasure trove of data on human competition, with baseball records alone going back more than a century.
"We're trying to quantify competitiveness and sort of understand it as a scientific problem," Ben-Naim said.
Still, there's statistical physics and then there's baseball, and Ben-Naim doesn't want to take the fun out of the game.
"You don't want games to become a coin toss," he said, "and you don't want them to be completely predictable, either."
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