Posts

Comerica Park, Detroit (MLB #22 - The season unraveling)

Image
    Few seasons play out exactly as a team had hoped. After all, every team hopes to win the World Series, and only one out of the 30 will do so. Every season has ups and downs, but many times, a season will unravel, for reasons that might or might not have been foreseen. This evening, we watched two teams whose seasons may have both unraveled in the last 10 days. Boston Red Sox – firing the manager The Boston Red Sox made the playoffs last year. Over the winter , they lost one of their best hitters, Alex Bregman, to the Cubs via free agency, but they thought that they had improved their pitching and defense, so they thought they might be better this year than last. Instead, they started out by winning only 10 of their first 27 games, putting them in the American League East. So they fired not only manager Alex Cora, but also five of their coaches. It was an ignominious end for Cora, whose tenure with the Red Sox started so well – in his first season, 2018, the Red So...
Post a Comment
Read more

Wrigley Field, Chicago (Are the Cubs unlucky?)

Image
      How unlucky are the Chicago Cubs? Even casual baseball fans know that the Chicago Cubs went a long time between winning World Series. Most Chicago fans probably know that “a long time” means that after a 1908 win, their next one was 108 years later, in 2016. About 60 years into that streak, I remember reading an item in my local newspaper, the Macomb Daily Journal (the Cubs and Cardinals were the two teams   that most kids in Macomb followed), which quoted some mathematician who had calculated that the odds against a streak that long were so high that the Cubs must be remarkably unlucky. Even as a teenager, without having had any courses in statistics, I could see flaw in that reasoning. But first, here’s how the calculation works. Right now, there are 30 teams in MLB. One will win the World Series, so that means you have a 1 in 30 chance of winning the World Series this year. That also means that you have a 29 in 30 chance (96.7%) of NOT winning the...
Post a Comment
Read more