From: dtate+@pitt.edu (David M Tate)
Newsgroups: rec.sport.baseball
Subject: Re: luck in baseball
Date: 29 Jul 92 19:50:56 GMT
Organization: Factors of Ys, Inc.

In article <19734@optima.cs.arizona.edu> dkl@cs.arizona.edu (David K. Lowenthal) writes:
>I have a real problem with some comments made on this newsgroup about
>luck.  I have not read them all, 

From your caricatures below, it's easy to wonder if you've read any of them.

>but Ms. Nichols especially continually
>talks about how luck enters in to one run games, world series play, etc.

Luck is a factor in the outcome of every plate appearance.  By extension, 
it affects outcomes of games and series.

>Well, I do not believe in luck in baseball, because the game is based
>on skill.  

As if the two were mutually exclusive.

Let's examine a few examples from other sports, just to set the ground rules.
Would you agree that Carl Lewis has a "skill" to run fast?  I would certainly
say that he does.  Now, every time Carl runs the 100 meters, does he get the
same time?  No.  Not even indoors, where the wind is not a factor.  Not even
in consecutive races on the same track.  What's more, nobody, not even Carl,
can predict in advance when Carl will be faster than usual and when he will
be slower than usual.  Sometimes he gets a better start than other times;
sometimes he leans at the tape a little better than other times; sometimes
he stays loose better than other times.  But the *timing* of these things, in
terms of which particular races will have which particular characteristics, is
(a) beyond his control (other than gross effects like eating right and getting
enough sleep), (b) unpredictable even moments in advance of the race, and (c)
all the difference between winning and losing, at that level of competition.

Now, Cult of Determinism folk like yourself probably prefer to attribute those
few tenths of a second in a particular race to "choking" or "coming through in
the big one", completely ignoring the fact that this race showed no more or
less variation from ordinary behavior than does a meaningless training race at
the Santa Monica Track Club.

Did Bill Virdon deliberately intend for his ground ball to kick off a pebble
and hit Tony Kubek in the throat in the 1960 World Series?  Yeah, right.

>I now explain a few scenarios mentioned often:
>
>1) The Twins were lucky to win game 7 because of Smith's baserunning error.

I haven't seen anyone make exactly this claim, but let's look at it.

>Response: NO, that is not luck.  The Braves played a player who is notorious
>  for doing dumb things.  Part of a player's makeup is his brain.  That
>  makes Smith a poorer player, and the Braves a poorer team overall than
>  they would have been had Smith been a smart player.

Fine.  So Lonnie Smith makes a dumb baserunning move once in every 20 or 30
times he gets on base.  It was certainly a lapse of skill on Smith's part,
but the Twins were incredibly fortunate that the lapse occurred at that
particular time.  (Unless, of course, Lonnie was deliberately throwing the
Series.  Is that what you're claiming?)  You don't seem to understand the
difference between saying that "The nature of this event is fundamentally
random" and "The *timing* of this event is fundamentally random."

>2) Intangibles are luck.

Again, nobody has claimed this.  What *has* been claimed is that intangibles
are often hypothesized when ordianary random variation (i.e. luck in the
timing of things) is sufficient to account for the observed events.  Add to
that the problem that intangibles are intangible, and you find that they have
little to no explanatory power.

>Response: NO, that is not luck.  Intangibles are things like managerial
>moves and team drive.  

Managerial moves are tangible.  Team drive is a good example, though, of a
label made up by mediots to attempt to explain *why* things happened the way
they did.  Much like the way myths arose to explain natural phenomena, when
you think about it.  

>You are telling me that if you took 2 equal teams
>and had Tony LaRussa manage one and someone that knows nothing about baseball
>managed that other, that when LaRussa's team performed better that would be
>luck?

No, I'm not.  Nobody else is, either.

>3) Bloop hits are luck and line drive outs are bad luck.

Of course.  Since batters can't control where the ball goes (else they would),
having the ball go someplace good even when you didn't hit it well must be IN
PART a matter of luck.  (Note the qualifier; nobody is denying that batters
have different levels of skill, which will make them MORE LIKELY to get good
outcomes in their plate appearances.)

>Response: NO, that is not luck.  Are you going to say that you lost
>the game on a couple of bloopers and that is bad luck?  What if your
>team got some bloopers in the same game?  What if the hitter fought
>off a good pitch and fisted it into right?

What if?  I don't see your point.  Your tone sounds like you think this is
some sort of _reductio_ad_absurdum_, but I don't see anything absurd about it.
The Pittsburgh Pirates won the 1960 World Series through a combination of some
skill and incredible gobs of luck.  That's the way it goes, sometimes.  The
majority of the skill shows in being in contention for the pennant.

>4) Bad calls are bad luck.
>
>Response: This is the only ray of hope the luck believers have.  

Oh, give it a rest.  Find me a player who can predict the outcomes of his
plate appearances in advance, and I'll admit that there's no luck involved.

Jim Dean has quoted Branch Rickey's old saw about luck being "the residue
of good planning", or words to that effect.  Rickey was using a bit of 
literary license.  A better way of putting it might be "Good choices are
those which help make luck operate in your favor."  In other words, playing
the odds (which Rickey believed in religiously) is a better way to win, in
the long run, than playing hunches.  Casinos have known this for ages; most
casino games are games of almost pure chance, but the house advantage (which
is simply a matter of odds) makes them guaranteed income.  

There is an excellent discussion of these issues, at a popular (but not 
patronising) level, in Paulos's book _Innumeracy_.  He discusses the fallacy
of looking for significant patterns in random sequences, and of attributing
cause and effect relationships (and hypothesizing invisible causes) in cases
where no such cause is needed to explain the data.  For the philosophically
inclined reader with little background in probability, Brian Skyrms's book
_Choice_and_Chance_ makes a nice introduction to the topic.


-- 
        David M. Tate        | "And that inverted Bowl we call The Dome
   dtate@unix.cis.pitt.edu   |  Whereunder crawling coop'd we field and bat,
   Edward "Mike" Fitzgerald  |     Lift not your eyes to *it* for help--for it
     from "The Ruthaiyat"    |  Will drop the tow'ring fly upon your hat."