Bill,  

 

That was an interesting question by Manhattanhi on the odds that the best team may win in team sports. Being a mediocre tennis player I was wondering what you thought the odds of winning a championship in an individual sport like tennis or other individual sports. For example if I know I am a better than another player I can often coast until it's late in the set, then play at full strength and generally win a close match. On the ATP and WTA tour the top players tend to player about 50 to 80 matches a year. Rod Laver in 1969 played 122 matches (winning 106 according to Bud Collins' encyclopedia) in winning the Grand Slam that year.  

 

In majors I believe, at least for the male players that there is less chance of an upset because it's a best of five set format instead of best of three in most tournaments.  

 

I would define a championship in being number one for that year.

Have you ever fiddled with the application of win shares to post season play?  

Re the "League of their Own" question: It has been awhile since I researched this stuff, but my memory is that the women's league started with what were essentially softballs, and that the size of the ball was reduced two or three times as the level of play improved-- but that they never actually got down to a regulation baseball, that it was always a little bigger and softer than a hardball, even though the women were not.

Further note on newspapers.com, perhaps only of interest to you.  The search engine is pretty horrible.  Basic boolean searching doesn't exist, near as I can tell.  There is the ability to drill down a search into various geographic regions and years.  But nothing like a Lexis/Nexis "monkey w/15 pelicans" search or the like.  They have a supposedly improved search page but the capabilities seem essentially the same.  The worst thing is that when you get a hit on the pages with monkeys and pelicans on them, it will then insist on taking you to every hit for the more popular term (monkeys) unless you edit the search manually on every "hit" page to take you to the "monkey."  I would like to be optimistic that the service will eventually improve the search . . . but it is owned by Ancestry.com and Ancestry's search engine is pretty sub-par also.

It seems to me that your observation about the shortness of the football season is the same as the one about the number of independent trials in an individual game, just at a different level. 

I was interested in your thoughts about the sport in which the best team is likely to win.  I agree it's basketball but for a somewhat different, although I suppose related reason.  It seems to me that in baseball much of what happens is essentially random and out of the control of an individual player.  For example, a guy hits a screaming line drive with runners on base right at the second baseman (Willie McCovey).  Or, conversely, he hits a bloop fly that falls in.  Or a ball takes a bad hop, etc, etc.  In basketball, the players have much more control over what happens because it's a matter of physical dominance; Michael Jordan is just better than Craig Ehlo so most of the time, he will win.  In baseball, talent isn't outcome determinative in the short-term as it is generally in basketball.  Football is in between.  

Hi Bill,  

 

I see your point there. 

You know who didn’t have such great luck?  Lefty Bill Short, that’s who. In August of ‘66 he was traded from the Orioles to the Red Sox, missing out on the World Series. Before the ‘67 season he was traded to the Pirates, missing out on another World Series. Then before the ‘69 season he was traded away from the Miracle Mets. There’s an alternate universe where this guy has a bio worth reading. He’s like the anti-Reggie Sanders...

Hi Bill... Regarding your observation on women’s Olympic running. It was at the 1928 (Amsterdam) Olympics, where women were granted the ‘distance’ run of 800 meters. Following the final, it seems some were aghast at the sight of women lying on the track, exhausted after finishing a World Record race (2:16.8). The women’s 800 wasn’t contested in the games, again, until 1960 (Rome), where the winner ran 2:04.3. The women’s marathon wasn’t contested until the 1984 Olympics in L.A., with Joan Benoit Samuelson (US) winning.

Hi Bill,  

 

The reason the business about Gaussian vs. skewed distributions is important, I think, can be shown by data sets like yours about career Win Shares among the KC Royals.  

 

According to the spreadsheet I use (Numbers for Mac), the best fit of the data is to a power law distribution (R2=0.9416). But if that's true, then that suggests that the player with the most career Win Shares for the KC Royals would—eventually—be a player with around 6000 Win Shares. Using a Gaussian distribution, on the other hand, we would expect that the next player to have the most career Win Shares for the KC Royals would have only marginally more than Brett.  

 

One way to put this is to say that a Gaussian distribution seems to assume that the data fully represents the underlying process, while skewed distributions do not. So that I think is the issue between you (who observes that baseball data is often highly skewed) and those who argue that baseball data is bell-shaped.  

 

Fair?  

 

Thanks!

Responding to your question about the source, I bought a subscription to newspapers.com for genealogical research.  The amount of scanned/searchable newspaper data is breathtaking.  They had the New Orleans Times Democrat of that era in the collection.  

Hey Bill: Have you ever studied the issue of, or do you have any thoughts on, in which sport is it more likely that the best team wins the championship? My impression is that it's 1. Basketball 2. Football 3. Baseball. In other words, baseball is more dependent on luck than the other sports. Any thoughts?  

 

I really enjoyed the movie "A League Of Their Own", and have always wondered why women's baseball seems to have died off while softball took its place?  Might be a better question for someone who knows women's softball better, but given your knowledge of history I thought you might have some insight.  Thanks.

It was cool to see a Hey Bill submission from Cary Grant. His "...what he meant by that," observation reminds me of a a really old joke, to wit:  

 

Two psychiatrists are walking towards each other. One says to the other, "Hello." The other one thinks to himself, "Hmmm...I wonder what he meant by that."

The brief monkey story is titled "1909: A Monkey On The Loose" and is on page 90 of The New Bill James HBA (first Free Press trade paperback edition 2003).  

 

You did not mention the Pelicans by name, you called them "the New Orleans team in the Southern League."  You called Henry "a rather large creature, perhaps a chimp, known for his surly disposition."    

 

When Shoeless Joe's contract was sold to the Cleveland Naps, he very much did not want to leave the Pelicans.  He was happy on his team and didn't care at all about going to the big leagues.  (He'd very reluctantly go to Cleveland and hit .408 as an American League rookie.)  This is a great example of something you said somewhere recently, that minor league teams used to really matter to players and fans and were not merely parts of "farm systems."