The "luck factor" in baseball...and pool?

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PoolSharkAllen

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
Recently there have been some threads in which the luck factor has been mentioned. I thought you might be interested in this article from the Wall Street Journal, in which the Luck Factor in baseball is discussed and even measured.

Luck appears to be a bigger factor in baseball than I realized, and perhaps by extension may be a bigger factor in various pool games than we give it credit for. :eek: Anyway, it's food for thought for the statistics gurus out there! :)

Baseball Confronts The Luck Factor
The Wall Street Journal Online
By Russell Adams

Is that team good -- or just lucky? Using research on randomness that's shaking up other fields, number-crunchers say they can answer the question.

Melky Cabrera, a highly touted 21-year-old outfielder for the New York Yankees, started off the season well, batting over .300 through early June. Now he is in a slump, hitting .189 in his last 10 games. For fans and the Yankees, the question is simple: How much of the rookie's impressive start was dumb luck?

A lot of it, according to some baseball number-crunchers. Using new statistical methods, they calculated that the equivalent of one in four of Mr. Cabrera's early-season hits resulted from chance, not skill. Subtracting out good luck, his early season batting average should have been .231 -- nearly 80 points lower than what showed up in the box scores.

Even in the numbers-obsessed world of sports, baseball has stood out for its efforts to track all aspects of the game. Now its fanatic record-keepers are on a quest to quantify something seemingly beyond measurement: the ethereal quality of luck. They're using insights into randomness that are shaking up other fields, from cancer research to weapons testing -- and that may even help you pick a good mutual fund.

By tallying minute details about every hit ball, statistics gurus say they can compute how much of a player's accomplishments stem from random factors. The results could affect which free agents should get top dollar after a great season and suggest which teams are likely to hold up in the pennant race.

In this alternate universe, where luck is taken out of the picture, the first-place Boston Red Sox would trail both the Yankees and the Toronto

Blue Jays. Fans of the Cleveland Indians, now stuck in fourth place in their division, would still have playoff hopes. And the Seattle Mariners' Ichiro Suzuki, one of the American League's leading hitters, would be struggling with a below-.300 average.

Most teams are tight-lipped about their use of luck-related statistics, but baseball executives acknowledge that it's becoming part of the decision-making process. Teams including the Red Sox, Indians and Oakland Athletics say they seek to weed out random factors in assessing players.

For the San Diego Padres, currently leading the National League West, measuring randomness will help guide critical decisions as baseball's July 31 trade deadline approaches. Among other things, the Padres use a method to calculate a statistic known as EOPS, which is a combination of a player's expected on-base percentage (the percentage of his at-bats he gets on base safely other than through errors or a fielder's choice) and his slugging percentage (a measure of batting average that gives more weight to extra base hits).

Before the Padres consider spending to beef up their lineup, they want to understand whether their division-leading season is more than just a fluke. "It's important to know: Are we for real or are we lucky?" says Kevin Towers, the team's general manager.


Here's the link for the article: http://biz.yahoo.com/weekend/bluck_1.html
 
that's idiotic.

"it is what it is".....and no team will be able to lowball a high powered sports agent by citing the statistical luck of his clients. what crap!
 
There are so many stats in different sports that to pick something specific out like "Joe Smith is 1-21 against the Cleveland Indians in night games" is meaningless. You can always manufacture stats like these because there are enough statistical possibilities (30 different teams, many different times slots, and probably a thousand others) so that you can create one that looks very peculiar. The fact is that Joe Smith's hitting likely follows a standard Poisson distribution, and when he gets to the plate he's no more likely to hit against the aforementioned Indians or if he is 11-21 against the Yanks. Just like if you flipped a coin a million times. Statistically you will find a patch of 19 straight heads, but during that period would you say tails was in a slump? The only meaningful result is if you found 750,000 heads came up in those million flips. That would prove a weighted coin.

So, let's forget the "No host player has every scored on his birthday in the opening match" and "a South American team have never scored between the 65th and 69th minute of a knockout match when he is wearing blue shorts" as insightful stats. It is expected.
 
Ooops! I inadvertantly omitted the full article in my initial post. Here's the rest of the article.

Baseball Confronts The Luck Factor - Continued

But for all the math and statistics involved, many of these calculations are more art than science. Each approach to factoring out luck comes with its own assumptions. Washington Nationals outfielder Jose Guillen is batting .220, well below his career average of .273. Has the 30-year-old lost a step after a decade in the big leagues? Or, is Mr. Guillen simply unlucky? Some luck researchers say random factors have hampered Mr. Guillen and his batting average should be more in line with his career numbers this year.

Skeptics say this approach places too much emphasis on the role of chance -- and that not everything in baseball can be reduced to numbers. Indeed, it only takes a few innings of watching a star like the St. Louis Cardinals's Albert Pujols to appreciate the difference between a great player and one who's mediocre.

The luck researchers agree that a player's skills are critical -- and say their numbers can help highlight whose contributions reflect skill and whose are more a product of chance. And they acknowledge that their numbers don't tell the whole story. Barry Bonds shows up in some calculations as consistently unlucky, but the researchers say the numbers mask extreme and unusual shifts by the defense when he is at bat. Those defensive moves rob Mr. Bonds of some hits -- and obscure his innate skills.

Scott Boras, an agent who has secured big contracts for Alex Rodriguez and other players, is known for using statistics-packed binders to persuade teams on the value of his clients. Mr. Boras says he has sometimes sought to show that a pitcher suffered from bad luck.

But he thinks data on batters are still too subjective to persuade a team. "You're not going to walk into a room if you're doing an arbitration case and subjectively say, 'This guy hit the ball hard but it just happened to go at people,' " he says.

Other sports are also exploring the role of randomness. In football, number-crunchers are challenging the notion that some teams are more skilled than others at recovering fumbles. Research in soccer suggests that whether a player decides to direct his penalty kick to the right, left or center of the goal, the percentage of actual goals is largely the same.

But baseball is at the forefront. Experts from statisticians to oddsmakers say chance plays an unusually big part in the game, partly because play is spread out over such a large area. The game's complexity is also relevant: The scoring value of a base hit, for instance, depends largely on factors outside the hitter's control -- namely the ability of the previous batters to get on base.

For J.C. Bradbury, economics professor at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., the desire to understand the role of chance in baseball started with a slump. In 2004, Atlanta Braves star Chipper Jones's hitting numbers were suffering. Even though Mr. Jones appeared to be hitting the ball well, he wasn't getting on base or hitting for power at his normal rate.

So Prof. Bradbury looked for statistics that would isolate the hitter's role in each at-bat -- and exclude the performance of the pitcher and fielders. The starting point was a mound of data on the characteristics of each ball put into play by Mr. Jones. Based on historical data on balls hit in similar ways, Prof. Bradbury estimated what should have happened, statistically speaking, in Mr. Jones's at bats.

In this approach, a ball hit on a trajectory that would typically send it past the fielder for a base hit counted as a hit for Mr. Jones regardless of whether he was called out in real life. Turns out, there were many such instances for Mr. Jones. Prof. Bradbury concluded the Braves star was suffering from a run of bad luck -- an indication he was likely to perform significantly better the next season. Indeed, in 2005, Mr. Jones's batting average bounced back to .296 from .248. "I was quite surprised at how well it predicted player performance," says Prof. Bradbury.

Statistics, of course, have long been a big part of baseball, but the last decade has seen an effort to drill down much deeper. Some of this has been driven by the rise of fantasy-baseball leagues, while Major League teams also have embraced statistics more aggressively. Oakland and its general manager, Billy Beane, helped pioneer efforts to look more closely at the value of individual players to their teams.

With teams and fantasy players hungry for more numbers, fans and companies started tracking virtually every aspect of every play. Now, thanks to the availability of this raw data, randomness researchers say they have the tools to more accurately factor out the effects of chance.

It has become a niche industry. Companies like Stats LLC and Baseball Info Solutions gather the raw data, stationing spotters at games and in front of TVs. Among other things, the spotters track the exact location where the ball lands on each play. In the case of BIS, the field is divided into a grid of 260 locations.

The Padres' Mr. Towers says his team spends a low-six-figure amount annually for this kind of data. MLB Advanced Media, the league's Internet arm owned jointly by all 30 teams, is increasingly moving into this area.

Other companies -- and some die-hard fans -- take this data and invent ways to crunch them. ProTrade is a startup co-founded by a former M.I.T. math whiz and staffed by engineers and former executives from companies like PayPal and eBay. Its primary business is hosting a market in which players are bought and sold like stocks, their values fluctuating based on their real-life performances. (ProTrade makes its revenue from advertising.) It began crunching luck data to help customers make decisions about who and when to buy and sell.

These calculations don't claim to be able to predict how luck is going to play out in any particular game or three-game series. Rather, they are averages, aimed at shedding light on the role of luck over the course of one or more seasons.

With baseball approaching the mid-season All-Star break, many fans are wondering if their teams have what it takes to go the distance. For a new take on that question, we asked ProTrade to figure out which teams have gotten the biggest boost from luck thus far. The results contained some surprises, in some cases effectively reshuffling baseball real-life standings. (See chart below.)

The unluckiest team in baseball? The Pittsburgh Pirates, who, if you subtract chance as a factor, would jump from last to third place in their division. At the other end of the spectrum are the Red Sox and Texas Rangers, the luckiest teams in the Majors. The New York Mets are off to their best start in years -- and it probably doesn't hurt that they have the fifth (Darren Oliver) and sixth (Brian Bannister) luckiest pitchers in baseball, ProTrade says. The Rangers, Mets and Red Sox declined to comment on the element of luck in their performance this year.

As many fans intuitively know, skill can only take a team so far -- winning a championship requires a certain amount of luck. It's "pretty unusual" for the best team in the league to win the World Series, says Jim Albert, a professor at Bowling Green State University who uses baseball to teach statistics. By several measures, the 2005 Chicago White Sox were one of the luckiest World Series winners in modern baseball history, winning as many as nine extra games due to chance.

The notion that baseball outcomes are so heavily dependent on chance doesn't always go over well in baseball clubhouses and front offices. For all the superstitions of pro ballplayers, from batters refusing to shave while on a hitting streak to pitchers wearing the same "lucky" undershirt game after game, many athletes and fans say luck plays a much smaller role than preparation, ability and effort.

Rick Hahn, assistant general manager of the White Sox, says that may be a coping mechanism. "There is a fair amount of luck involved in this game," he says. "It's probably such a high amount that it could keep you up at night and eat away at your stomach lining if you let it."

Write to Russell Adams at russell.adams@wsj.com.
 
basketball stats can be inconclusive because the factor where the NY knicks{highest paid team} has a lot of talent that refuses to get injured and ruin their contract. Resulting in decreased performance and the worst record in NY history.
 
it boils down to people being in love with themselves or what they do. they want to justify their relevance. so really,,,they do it for the art of doing it. it's labwork that has no practical use.
 
labwork does create new models for perspective. Models have plenty of practical work, its finding the correct application that can be difficult.
 
justnum said:
labwork does create new models for perspective. Models have plenty of practical work, its finding the correct application that can be difficult.
Click to expand...
I can think of a two examples where "luck" does come into play fairly often in pool:
- You're playing 8-ball. Your initial plan was to play the 3-ball followed by the 5-ball. You play the 3 and but miss position on the 5. By good fortune, the 1-ball is nearby so you decide to play that instead and subsequently continue your run.
- Your opponent has a relatively easy shot on the game ball that he should make 90% of the time. Unfortunately, he misses; whereupon, you finish off the game. Instead of a loss, you now have a win.

This concept of luck in pool is somewhat abstract, however, I was amazed that professional teams in baseball are trying to measure it and possibly apply it too.

I presented this article on the "luck factor" in baseball to this forum so that everyone can get a different perspective on this subject. :)
 
justnum said:
Models have plenty of practical work, its finding the correct application that can be difficult.
Click to expand...

in it's practical relevance to sports, i cannot agree. players don't think about luck, they simply do.
 
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