Championships and Luck

I think Wojo's point about the mano-a-mano nature of baseball is a good one. If a star player goes 1-for-18 in the playoffs, there's no one else to blame but the player, and maybe the quality of pitcher he faces - in basketball and football, its much easier to credit the defense. Now, if that 1-for-18 streak happened in May, we'd simply call it a slump, and people are now even well-versed enough to say things like "regression to the mean" and "small sample size." But only in May. Why?

If we recognize that a player's performance in an important baseball game is as likely to be good as performance in a regular baseball game (and lots of studies have showed this to be basically true), then a 3-for-4 game is just good luck, and an 0-for-4 game is bad luck. What follows from that is problematic for a lot of people - the outcome of a baseball game is determined by the talent of the two teams and the way the two teams match-up, but also by the luck of the draw in terms of players' performance levels. This idea is anathema to the way people want to think about champions as "the best."

Baseball is an interesting sport to discuss for this point, because teams are much more bunched together than in other sports - no team has ever had a regular season approaching the '07 Pats or the '96 Bulls in terms of winning percentage (or, on the flip side, the '08 Lions or the current Nets). Good baseball teams win 60% of their games, and bad ones win 40%. It's not completely uncommon for a bottom team to sweep a series with a very good team. So, when two good teams play, the odds of either team winning have to be close to a coin flip (a better discussion of baseball odds appears in this Phil Birnbaum post). But the winner of that coin flip is exhaulted, and the loser is questioned. We don't give a title to the team that would win the most if we played the season 1000 times - we only play the season once.

To simply explain the results of a 7-game series as luck would make sports seem hollow. Who cares about a dice roll? So instead, we look for reasons why performance was good or poor in that moment. We find character flaws in the losers, and build the winners into supermen. Now, these discussions aren't completely without merit. How a player responds to pressure must have some impact on performance, particularly on the negative side (anyone who's played sports knows the feeling of being "tight" in a big moment and having to overcome that). But it's generally less than one might think.

Recognizing that doesn't necessarily take the fun out of sports, but it does take a lot of the morality out of sports, and baseball writers/fans love morals (see any discussion of steroids ever). Perhaps that explains the resistance.