MLB. And here comes the Post Season!

The Game Room
1121

Wow. To reiterate (and you know how much I just love to reiterate :slight_smile: ), I am not a baseball fan in any sense of the word, with absolutely NO emotional stake in who won this. When I learned of the Cubs’ victory…I didn’t even see it as it happened, it was a damn ESPN headline…it shook me. It shook me down to my bones. I had trouble sleeping that night. I might have trouble sleeping tonight. The Crap Is Finally Over. And with the Red Sox and White sox already getting the 900,000 megaton gorillas off their back in consecutive years (and why was this never treated as an enormous honking deal), that means that ALL OF The Crap Is Finally Over. No more curses and hexes and jinxes and albatrosses. Baseball is a sport again.

I…I can barely process this. I don’t even know where to begin. I’m not certain I ever will. This is just so, so huge. Even ESPN seems to be at a loss for words. What’s the catchphrase? Who are the heroes? I can’t even say. The world is so completely different now. It’s like a caveman discovering air travel.

I will say that I am very glad that the fandoms, as a whole, have wised up to the utter lunacy of blaming one random party for blowing an entire series and completely ignoring every single other extenuating circumstance that went into the collapse. (Kudos to Larry Borgia for the link; it was a definite eye-opener for me.) Let’s be clear, Chicago owes Steve Bartman big time, and if took the universe turned on its head to do it, well, right thing/wrong reason. It’s pathetic that this is often the best we can do, but so be it.

1122

A couple of reasons:

  • it was an enormous deal, at least it was for the Red Sox. Can’t recall if it was for the [del]Black[/del] White Sox. For the Red Sox, 1918 and the Curse of the Bambino, winning in 2004 was a huge deal. But now the Red Sox have moved from being the Lovable Losers that they were, to The Evil Empire II that they are now (somewhat).
  • The Cubs were the Ultimate Lovable Losers. So last night’s win sure is a big deal, especially after that longest drought of 108 years.

But what will the Cubs do now, now that they’ve finally won? They aren’t the Lovable Losers any more. In fact they just might be a dynasty with that young team they put on the field.

1123

  1. Because the Red Sox story happened first, and was more visually spectacular, with them coming back from 3-0 down against the most famous baseball team ever. That was basically The Curse Story. The entire team were Sporstmen of the Year. The White Sox did it second (and they just blew through the playoffs; no series they were in was remotely interesting.) It’s like being the second person to fly across the Atlantic solo. You know who Lindbergh was, but who was that?

  2. Because nobody cares about the White Sox. The Cubs are the preferred team of Chicago, and of its white, wealthy residents; the White Sox are their poor cousins.

I mean, as to the impact of this, I can’t say it blows me away. Yeah, the Cubs have been losers for a century, but I’ll tell you what; 40 or 50 years from now when the Reaper comes for me, some other team, and maybe more than one, will be at or approaching a century without a World Series. We have a surprising number of teams with 40, 50 or more years in the league who have never won the World Series, and in the case of the Nationals and Mariners (yes, the Mariners just finished their 40th season), never even been in one. Cleveland has been waiting 68 years, and many of the original franchises are now over 25 years since their last taste of the big prize (Tigers, Dodgers, Orioles, A’s, Mets, Pirates, and Reds.) It’s been 30 years for the Mets. Not all of those teams are going to win it in the next ten or twenty or forty or sixty years.

I just don’t believe in curses. The Cubs didn’t win because things just didn’t work out for them. From 1909 to 1945 they were a consistently first rate franchise with many fine players, and won many pennants, but kept losing the World Series. It just happens. Then they sucked for a long time and that just happens. Since 1984 they’ve put winning teams on the field now and then, often very fine teams, and they came close, but luck is cruel, whaddya gonna do. This year they were finally both good AND lucky. It’s just baseball. I mean, back to the Mariners, how does a team that produced so many incredible talents in a short span of time not at least get to the World Series?

God willing MLB or some evolution of it will be around for 500 years. And if it is teams will go a century or more without winning it all.

1124

I AM a baseball fan. A really big one. In every sense of the word.

And this dramatic hyperbole is just weird. Really weird.

Yeah, a team that hadn’t won for a long time has finally won, and they did it in a really fun and exciting way. It’s pretty damn cool, i had lots of fun watching it, and i’m very happy for all of the Cubs fans who are so excited about the result.

But “shook me down to my bones” and “the world is different now” and “baseball is a sport again”? LOL. Baseball never stopped being a sport, and the world really is no different. As for your sleep, might i suggest an ambien?

I agree with you about this, but if people overreact in cases like this, it might be because some folks give them the idea that the results of sporting contests are of bone-shaking, world-changing importance.

1125

I keep meaning to do the math, but my probability skills have their limits, but with 30 teams (I think it is 30, I don’t actually know), the average expected value between championships is 30 years. That means some will have shorter times between championships (TBC) and some will have longer. In that respect 40-50 year TBC doesn’t seem unreasonable at all. 108 is certainly an anomaly, but the probability of that happening isn’t just the low chance of not winning for the cubs, it’s the chance of a 108 year drought happening to anyone of the 30 teams. That it happened to the cubs is, from a probabilistic standpoint, irrelevant.

So for the mathematically inclined, I wonder what the probability of a team (any of the MLB teams) going 100 years without a win. Maybe simulation is the way to go.

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Except they are very rich.

1127

So I got myself curious and realized that simulation rather than hardcore math could give a decent insight without a lot of fuss.

Simulating 30 teams with an equal chance to win in any year for 10,000 years yielded 353 champions who took 100 years or more since their previous championship. That’s 3.53%, which isn’t as low as I would have expected it to be.

At the end of the simulation* the team with the longest drought is at 87 years and counting.
followed by a team with 65 years and counting
followed by 55
48
46 and 44.

The mean time between championships was 29.928, which is close to the expected 30.

Conclusion: long droughts are not uncommon. That we haven’t seen more long droughts is probably due to the relatively short time period of real World Series and the fact that many teams aren’t even 100 years old yet (I think that is true).

*note: the length of the simulation is irrelevant to the ‘and counting’ static. It is essentially a sample of 1.

1128

Bluing of the Chicago River for today’s celebration.

1129

sachertorte:

Also, until 1960, there were only 16 teams. I think only the Phillies and Browns/Orioles didn’t win a World Series during that time period.

1130

If my Comcast Channel Guide Fu is good, it seems that the MLB Network is re-showing the games again (in condensed format) this Sunday. Let’s see how the universe feels about my DVR abilities as I skip church for the 18,000th time in a row.
Or this is going to be just like Superbowl XXV for me. I’m originally from western New York, so I’m a built in Bills fan. To have *my *team in the Superbowl was a dream come true. Alas, I had a job that included a Sunday schedule and I couldn’t get the day off. I still haven’t seen any second of that game (outside of a handful of *wide right *clips from which I try to avert my eyes whenever possible).

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Of the 30 teams, 16 are “original” and have been around since at least 1901. (They are not all in the city there were in in 1901, but are considered a single continuous franchise.) The other 14 teams are less than 100 years old:

1961 (56 seasons)
L.A. Angels; won World Series in 2002
Texas Rangers, formerly Washington Senators #2: Never won

1962 (55 seasons)
NY Mets; won World Series in 1969, 1986
Houston Astros: Never won

1969 (47 seasons)
San Diego Padres: Never won
Washington Nationals fm. Montreal Expos: Never won
Milwaukee Brewers form. Seattle Pilots: Never won
Kansas City Royals: Won World Series in 1985, 2015

1977 (40 seasons)
Toronto Blue Jays: won World Series in 1992, 1993
Seattle Mariners: never won

1993 (24 seasons)
Miami/Florida Marlins: won World Series in 1997, 2003
Colorado Rockies: never won

1998 (19 seasons)
Arizona Diamondbacks: won World Series in 2001 (fastest expansion team to do this)
Tampa Bay Rays: Never won

So we have some very long droughts that are, in a sense, forever; Houston and Texas have been around for over half a century each with no World Series wins at all, meaning the state of Texas is collectively in a drought that pretty much equals the Cubs.

You can play with this in any number of ways. I used random.org to simply generate random numbers from 1 to 30. The Sixes won the World Series in year 2 and then again in, of course, year 6, and then the Nineteens immediately won it back to back. Four years later the Sixes won a third title, and the Nineteens matched that feat a decade later. By Year 35 the Sixes had won it three more times, albeit never back to back. They didn’t win again until year 84.

After 100 years the Eights, Thirteens (figures) and Seventeens still had never won. The Nines won three in a row; the most successful teams were the Sixes and Twenty-Nines, with eight championships.

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Indians fans try to look on the bright side: http://www.thisiscle.com/archive/its-all-good/

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A little musical case for Steve “Don’t Blame Steve”. I’m familiar with Serengeti’s work, but somehow missed this one. (Serengeti is a local rap artist who experiments in various styles and alter egos. This one is in the voice of Kenny Dennis, a working class character from Chicago.)

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Assuming all teams were equally good, and, thus, the winner of the World Series could be considered a random event, the chance of a team going 100 years without winning in a 30-team league is easy to calculate: (29/30)^100 = 3.37…% Notice that this agrees well with the experimental chance sachertorte got.

The Cubs went from 1908 through to the end of the “classic” period in 1960 without winning. Again, assuming random chance, the Cubs had a 3.27% chance of doing that (16 team league). Of course, over that time frame, the Yankees pretty clearly showed that “random” chance was not applicable. In the years since, the chance of missing out (randomly) on the WS crown is greater and greater; still, without bothering to calculate it out, I’d be willing to bet it was a significantly less than 1% chance of the Cubs managing to do what they did: go 1909 through 2015 without winning.

1135

And flipping coins and running random sims is great. The math works out. Wonderful.

Baseball isn’t played by coins or computers. At some point the fact that the Cubs were “cursed by the goat” becomes an actual factor in outcomes. Any setback, no matter how minor (Hi Bartman!) gets blown out of proportion. Any loss gets magnified. This is a case where prior performance can absolutely have an impact on future performance.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the Indians not only don’t win the Series next year, they don’t even make it back there. Or the next. Or the next. Or the next. Eventually, this team has to break up and the next one isn’t so good. Now it’s 10-15-20 years down the road and the “streak” is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Pressure’s on and after a while it takes a lot of talent, a fair amount of luck, and a special chemistry to overcome it.

Sports is, at heart, entertainment. And by that measure, this Cubs team and this Series ranks up there with the best ever.

1136

how is ths not true of every team every year?

Do you really think a 26 year old professional athlete gives a shit about some obscure story about a goat?

1137

Disregarding history, this was the second best World Series I’ve ever seen. And, as a die-hard Cub fan, it pains me to say that. But number one, to me, will always be the Marlins/Indians series in 1997.

1138

1991 Game 7. Absolutely nail-biting from start to finish.

1139

That one is my gold standard, too.

1140

Certainly a classic, and the entire series was. Wikipedia:

But for historical value the 2016 World Series is tops. Two teams whose droughts were a combined 176 years, and the longest-ever drought of 108 years ends.

And, looking forward, both teams look to be contenders for years to come.