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Dan Shanoff pointed me in the direction of a very interesting article by Carl Bialik of the Wall Street Journal. Carl, The Numbers Guy, weighs the factors of math (probability) to conventional baseball factors such as talent and momentum to decide what's contributed more to the Rockies incredible run, winning 21 of 22.
No baseball team has ever had a streak this good so late in the season. That might seem to confirm a piece of baseball conventional wisdom, namely that hot teams such as the Rockies have a sort of momentum of winning that overcomes their underlying skill level and the historical record. But researches would argue the opposite: A hot streak such as the Rockies’ is just what one would expect to arise eventually if each baseball game were a flip of a coin, albeit a coin weighted according to the teams’ skill levels — just like if you flip a coin a couple hundred thousand times, you’d expect to see a run of 21 heads out of 22 at some point. And the Rockies overall have been no more streaky than you’d expect this season had their games been decided by coin flip, as Prof. Reifman wrote recently on his blog.The easy answer here is clearly a little of each factor. One of the primary reasons I love baseball due to the emphasis on statistics and using certain formulas to predict future success instead of intangible factors and your own gut. When push comes to shove I side with the intangibles, but probability and sabermetrics serve as an incredibly useful compass.
"Are the Rockies merely by happenstance the team that sits on the edge of the bell curve (just lucky, as Tim Marchman recently wrote in the New York Sun), or is there something intrinsic to the team, at this time, that made it the one with the once-in-history hot streak?
Certainly this was bound to happens sooner or later, but the Rockies didn't just end up in this position by happenstance. You create some of your own luck by being a very good baseball team riding a wave of confidence. How much luck do you factor into the Rockies unprecedented run?
Are the Rockies Really that Good or Just Lucky (WSJ)
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