The Baseball Playoffs are a Crapshoot, but Having 100 Wins Doesn’t Hurt

The Cubs wound up the regular season with the best record in baseball: 103 wins (out of only 161 games, due to a rain-out that went down as a tie). Does this guarantee that the Cubs will win it all this year? No. In fact, if you read Slate, “having such a record is nearly a kiss of death.”

Hmm

The premise of the piece seems that winning 100 games actually hurts you in the playoffs, as does having the best regular season record. What follows from that assertion would be an exercise in p-hacking, if any of the supporting evidence were statistically significant. Instead, it is exactly the sort of exercise in anecdotal misinterpretation that statistics were invented to avoid.

It is certainly true that having the best record in the regular season does not guarantee postseason success. Baseball is a game where any team can beat any other on a given day. Typically, only one or two teams win more than 60% of their games over the course of the regular season, and winning 55% will usually get you into the playoffs. When these teams play each other in a best-of-five or best-of-seven series, the odds of the “better” team coming out on top are not much different from a coin toss.

But does it hurt you? Let’s see what stats Slate musters to support the argument. They restrict their analysis to the 21 years from 1995 through 2015, when the playoffs have had the current wildcard structure. During that time:

• No National League team has won 100 regular-season games and won the World Series. The only team in baseball to achieve the feat is the New York Yankees, in 1998 and 2009. Only two 100-win National League teams have even reached the Series.

Okay, during that time period six National League teams and eight American League teams have won at least 100 regular season games. If each playoff was a 50/50 coin toss, each of those teams would have a one in eight chance of winning the world series. So, the expected number of NL wins would be 0.75, and the expected number of AL wins would be 1.0. The NL falls slightly below expectation (0/6), but not significantly so. The AL exceeds expectation (2/8), as does the combined NL-AL record (2/14).

No team other than the aforementioned 1998 and 2009 Yankees has posted the outright best record in baseball and won the World Series. Boston won the Series in 2007 and 2013 after tying for baseball’s best record.

In five of the 21 years, there was a tie for the best record in baseball. So, in the 16 years with a single best record, that team won the world series twice. Again, coin toss would give you a one in eight chance, so 2/16 is right in line with expectations. In the five years with a tie, there’s a one in four chance that one of those two teams will win, so the expected number of wins would be 1.25, less than the 2/5 Red Sox wins.

Last year, Kansas City became the seventh team of the wild-card era to post the best record in its league (excluding Boston’s tie in 2007) and win the World Series. In that same span, six wild-card teams have won the Series.

Well, if it’s a coin toss, the team with the best record would have the same odds of winning as the wildcard (or the two wildcards combined, in the extra-expanded playoff structure in place since 2012). So, pretty much what you would expect.

• The top National League team in the regular season hasn’t won the World Series since the Atlanta Braves did it in 1995.

This is the first statistic that seems to deviate at all from expectation. In 21 years, if the top NL team had a one in eight chance of winning the World Series each year, you would expect 21/8 World Series wins. That is, more than two, but fewer than three. And one is less than two, right? Well, the probability that you would have zero wins in 21 years is about 6%. The probability that you would have one win is about 18%.

The standard way to ask this question is to say, “What is the probability that the observed value would deviate by this much or more from expectation”.  That probability, in this case, is about 24%. So, not really all that unlikely at all.

Or, in sciencey terms, p=0.24, and we fail to reject the null hypothesis that having the best record in the National League gives you less than a one in eight chance of winning the World Series.

Plus, it’s a bit weird to cherry-pick the top NL team. After all, we were just told that Kansas City was the seventh team to win the World Series after posting the best record in its league. The six cases besides 1995 Atlanta are all from the AL (and exclude the 2007 Red Sox, who tied with Cleveland for the best record).

So what would happen if we asked the analogous AL question. Well, of the 19 years when there was a single top record in the AL, six of those teams went on to win the World Series. The chances of at least six teams doing that, given 1/8 odds, is about 2.5%.

Now, we can’t really read anything into that result, since it is one of a number of statistical tests we did here, so any multiple-tests correction would eliminate the significance of the results. But if we had asked the question about top AL records in isolation, notice that it would have supported the conclusion that having a good regular-season record helps, rather than hurts, your playoff chances.

I wonder why they didn’t include that analysis . . .

 

You Can Stop Donating to the NC GOP Now, Please

Following the firebombing of a Republican campaign office in Hillsborough, NC over the weekend. Shortly thereafter, a group of self-identified Democrats (but not part of the Clinton campaign) set up a gofundme campaign to raise funds to help them reopen, and within a few hours, they had raised $13,000.

The impulse to donate to something like this seems honorable on the surface. It’s a way of rising above partisan politics to condemn political violence. It’s also bullshit.

There is exactly one legitimate reason to donate to a campaign like this: to disrupt the media narrative of “Democrats firebomb GOP offices”. Sort of a show-don’t-tell version of #NotAllDemocrats. Mission accomplished. This fundraising campaigns will now be part of the news story, which will blunt attempts by Republican operatives to make this a campaign issue, or, worse, to encourage and justify things like voter intimidation at the polls.

So, I’m glad the gofundme campaign happened. But you can stop now, and maybe pause to consider the ways in which donating to the NC GOP is a bad idea, and how the decision to do so maybe does not reflect so well on you as you might think.

1. We don’t know what happened, yet

Despite Trump’s claim that the firebombing was perpetrated by “Animals representing Hillary Clinton and Dems”, we don’t actually know who did this or why. Yes, one option is that it was people associated with the Clinton campaign and/or the Democratic Party. A more likely possibility is that is was some pissed-off, disenfranchised kids who are fed up with Trump’s hate-fueled campaign.

It’s also possible that this was a false flag attack as part of an attempt to undermine the emerging narrative of Trump supporters being particularly violent. I’m not saying that this is particularly likely, but it is certainly not unprecedented. The most famous case, of course, is the Reichstag fire, which at least some historians believe was ordered by the Nazis to create a pretense for curtailing civil liberties. Certainly if any group were predisposed to do something like this, it would be hangers on of the Trump campaign.

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There’s also the issue of the graffiti left at the scene: a swastika and the message “Nazi Republicans Leave Town Or Else”. What seems strange to me is the inclusion of the swastika. Most liberals perceive writing a swastika as an act of violence in itself, similar to using the N-word. I think your typical anti-Nazi activist would tend to shy away from drawing a swastika, even in the context of calling someone a Nazi. I’m not generally inclined towards conspiracy, but this, more than anything, makes me think that it’s a possibility in this case.

2. They don’t need the money

I assume that the NC GOP had insurance, and that the losses suffered in the fire will be fully covered. And I know that they have the financial resources to open another office, even if it takes some time for that insurance check to come through. So, while donating to “reopen the office” seems like fair play, in practice, your money is actually going to go to fund general operating expenses, that is, to elect Trump and down-ballot Republicans.

And if, for some reason, the NC GOP is not insured (or “self insured”, as the parlance goes), keep in mind that this is the party of personal responsibility. The libertarian argument against insurance mandates is that you should have the right to assume your own risk. The second half of the argument, for non-hypocrites, anyway, is that you should not expect anyone else to bail you out once you’ve made that choice.

3. Other charities exist

Donating to the NC GOP as a way of “not condoning” the firebombing makes a lot of sense, if you view the act in complete isolation. But the implication, of course, is that you are condoning every disaster – man-made or natural – that you did not donate to. And, in North Carolina, the NC GOP bears direct responsibility for at least some of the disasters befalling poor people, minorities, and LGBTQ folks.

If you’re a Democrat who was moved to open your wallet because some Trump/Pence signs got burned and the NC GOP is going to need to rent office space in a different strip mall, but you were not moved to open your wallet by the flooding of poor communities by Hurricane Matthew, or the systemic disenfranchisement of minorities, or the regressive anti-trans policies, maybe you need to take a good long look at what your actual motives were.