Adrian Posted April 30, 2014 Share Posted April 30, 2014 And you can't go 3/7 once In three series. And do that four times in fiver years! And the Yankees probability is nowhere near 75% a game (didn't the only win 87 in 1999 or something). Remarkable team, but a fortunate one. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Adrian Posted April 30, 2014 Share Posted April 30, 2014 Also those Yankees were in a five game wildcats world, making an upset much more likely. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
mitchells Posted April 30, 2014 Share Posted April 30, 2014 I don't get how an overwhelming favorite wins in a dominating fashion and is considered lucky. In 98and 99 they lost only 1 World Series game. Are you saying all great teams are lucky to have won as many championships as they did? If they were lucky then they were not great. 1 Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Adrian Posted April 30, 2014 Share Posted April 30, 2014 They were a great team. But they were lucky to win as many series as they did because the probability of winning that many championships is very small even for extremely talented teams. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Lex Posted April 30, 2014 Share Posted April 30, 2014 Hey hey hey. As of 11:30PM tonight do you know who has the same record as the Yankees? Your NY Mets. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Anthony Bonner Posted April 30, 2014 Share Posted April 30, 2014 I don't get how an overwhelming favorite wins in a dominating fashion and is considered lucky. In 98and 99 they lost only 1 World Series game. Are you saying all great teams are lucky to have won as many championships as they did? If they were lucky then they were not great. The only losing one game thing is incredibly lucky. But to your broader point a .750 teams requires much much less luck to win a series than does a .600 team, but it still needs some luck. Or at least a lack of bad luck. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
joethefoodie Posted April 30, 2014 Share Posted April 30, 2014 I don't get how an overwhelming favorite wins in a dominating fashion and is considered lucky. In 98and 99 they lost only 1 World Series game. Don't you know - Secretariat was lucky. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Anthony Bonner Posted April 30, 2014 Share Posted April 30, 2014 It's not like there isn't heaps of research on this. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
mitchells Posted April 30, 2014 Share Posted April 30, 2014 Never crossed my mind that John Wooden's UCLA was the luckiest college basketball team of all time. I think what Bonner said is more accurate. A lot of bad luck can take down a great team but the better the team is, the more bad luck is required for them to lose. Great teams overcome average amounts of bad luck. Take the Pats vs Giants in 2007. Were the Giants "lucky" to win that game due to Tyree's catch? As a Giants fan I'd say that yes, they were fortunate. But if the Pats were as great as everyone made them out to be, the game wouldn't have been that close and Tyree's catch wouldn't have mattered. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
mitchells Posted April 30, 2014 Share Posted April 30, 2014 Let's take this week's upcoming Kentucky Derby. With 20 horses in the race, a horse needs to be "lucky" in order to win. Even great horses need to be lucky because of the size of the field. Which is why I'll be betting on a longshot. Or several of them. 1 Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Anthony Bonner Posted April 30, 2014 Share Posted April 30, 2014 Football is even higher variance than baseball. Luck plays a bigger role game to game. Not to mention it's a single game not a best of 7. Basketball is the lowest variance major sport and Wooden had Sam Gilbert. Seriously though I think UCLA back then was so much better than anyone else that even with bad luck they were still better. College sports - especially back then - had much greater dispersion in skill levels hence streaks like UCLA and Oklahoma in CFB. I'm not sure that good luck rather than an absense of bad luck is actually anything more than a rhetorical flourish for saying actual outcome = expected outcome. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Anthony Bonner Posted April 30, 2014 Share Posted April 30, 2014 Let's take this week's upcoming Kentucky Derby. With 20 horses in the race, a horse needs to be "lucky" in order to win. Even great horses need to be lucky because of the size of the field. Which is why I'll be betting on a longshot. Or several of them. Yeah but this is also layering in a second complexity having to do with gambling payoffs. It's a "harder" question than just luck v skill. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Adrian Posted April 30, 2014 Share Posted April 30, 2014 Is football higher variance than baseball? I'm not sure the research says that. Of course the Wooden teams required some luck. Now, most of those Wooden teams had 0 or 1 loss during the season - they were simply more much, much, much more talented than almost everyone in the field. The Yankees are different. Their best team during that period won just over 70% of its regular season games; the worst team won barely over 50% (87 games, the second wost by a Yankees team in the Wild Card era. Maybe this is their problem now - they should aim for fewer than 90 wins and the playoffs, they win 1/3rd of the time those years!). It's reasonable to assume their playoff odds in each game were lower given that they were playing the other best teams in the league. The skill gap between those teams and the rest of the league wasn't enough that the expectation should have been that many championships. That was a highly unlikely outcome. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Anthony Bonner Posted April 30, 2014 Share Posted April 30, 2014 Yes if Mauboussin is to be believed Quote Link to post Share on other sites
mitchells Posted April 30, 2014 Share Posted April 30, 2014 Let's take this week's upcoming Kentucky Derby. With 20 horses in the race, a horse needs to be "lucky" in order to win. Even great horses need to be lucky because of the size of the field. Which is why I'll be betting on a longshot. Or several of them. Yeah but this is also layering in a second complexity having to do with gambling payoffs. It's a "harder" question than just luck v skill. I don't understand why it is any different. There are gambling payoffs in all sports. The favorite in the Derby is going to need more luck to win the race than the Miami Heat will need to win the NBA championship. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
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