I also find it hard to believe that Mantle hit a ball 565 feet. At sea level, most physicists believe that any home runs longer than 450+ feet are going to require some assistance from the wind.
Mantle’s homer was measured at that distance only because the Yankees PR guy went out after the game and asked some kid on the street where he picked up the ball. That’s not exactly using a surveyor.
Well, 565 may not be exactly correct, but homeruns over 500 feet are hit very rarely, but once in a while, it will go. Id consider anything over 500 feet amazing if there is no wind.
I am not sure what this thread is about. There is opinion inherint in the question because you are comparing stats in different sports, but a few thoughts…
Given enough time, no way would I ever hit in 56 straight games in MLB. Hitting a baseball is incredibly difficult. I have heard some people comment that if you viewed hitting a baseball from a purely mathematical or physics standpoint, you would most likely conclude it was impossible to do. Sure, given enough time, this record will probably be broken by some other major leaguer, but to say anyone could hit in 56 straight given enough time is ridiculous unless you are talking about millions or billions of years of baseball played.
Chamberlains 100 point game was remarkable, but I think it will be broken one day manily because it only takes one game to do it. Who knows when someone will get incredibly hot and somehow break the record. Reggie Miller scored 25 points in a quarter and 8 in eight seconds once. Robinson, under odd circumstances, scored 71 a few years back. I could see it happening. Now 50 points for a season....that would be pretty tough. I'd be surpised if someone beat that. Kobe scored over 50 in like 10 or so straight games last year and everyone was AMAZED. Averaging that for a season....won't happen. The rules today just don't allow it. The new 3 second rule was the only thing that stopped Chamberlain
Cy Youngs 511 will be tough, or impossible, to beat under today's baseball rotations. I think he also has some amazing complete game and shutout records, though I can't quote them. ANyway, 20 game winners in a season are all stars. You would need 26 years of 20 win season to beat 511. That would be every year from age 18 to 44, hoping for no injuries. It just won't happen.
Someone mentioned Carl Lewis and his long jump wins.....there was a high jumper that won every RACE he was in, even the lower heats, for like 10 years. Can't think of his name now. A 10 year winning streak.Perhaps a better game to illustrate the principle is golf. If you look at shooting accuracy on a par 3 hole, you find a zone around the pin where the shot is likely to land, shot after shot. Sometimes, the point will result in the ball in the cup, a hole in one.
You can do the math to discover what the odds are of getting a hole-in-one, given a player’s shot accuracy. From that, you can calculate how likely it is for a pro golfer to get one in a year, or a career.
If you track the actual career holes-in-one of all the pro golfers, and corrected for their individual accuracy, I’ll bet you’d have a pretty good bell curve, with some golfers out on the tails ends. It’s the tail end guys who make the news.
IUHomer:
I don’t think you meant high jumper, I think you were talking about 400m hurdles, and I think you are talking about Edwin Moses.
I think that sheer athleticism and total dominance of one sport there really cannot be much to equal Eddy Merckx.
He won five Tour De France, one of which he had to do without the support of his team following an argument, to win a tour under such circumstances is unthinkable, no one else has won the tour without team support, and it is extremely unlikely that it is actually possible.
Add to this his career record of 34 Tour De France stage wins, plus all the other races he won, and he held the world hour record - which could only be broken some 12 years later at altitude, on a far more technically advanced machine(which is also now banned due to limitations on the size of the back wheel)
Had Merckx been riding such a machine at the same altitude with the same amount of preparation time one can only speculate what he would have achieved.
Add in his 6 day track event wins, something that few road riders now make much of a priority, it is the breadth of his achievements in cycling, beating specialists in fairly narrow fields.
First man ever to win the Tour De France, The Giro D’Italia, and the World Road Race Championship titles in one year.
Look at this for a sporting career,
http://townsleyb.members.beeb.net/procycle/merckxe.htm
As for one hard man, he was attacked by French spectator in the 1975 Tour De France on one horrible climb which affected him for some days afterwards, he fell a couple of days later and fractured a cheekbone, and due to drug control was not allowed any painkillers, anyone would have forgiven his retiring the race, he had little chance of winning, but he continued and finished second.
Sure you could.
And that’s exactly what we’re talking about. On the other hand you could conceivably get 56 hits in your first 56 games. Such is the nature of random events.
Xavier, I still don’t know what you’re trying to get at.
Of course there was some luck involved! That’s the nature of baseball. The hitter has to anticipate what the pitcher is throwing, where it’s going to go, and when it’s going to get there. He has to time and place his swing just right, put the ball where no one can get to it easily, and outrun the ball to at least first base. Don’t you think there’s just a wee bit of luck in all of that?
Actually I think you have to say that, yes, he did have the pure athletic ability to repeat his accomplishment 55 times in a row. The 26 foot mark probably represented Beaman’s physical limits, but to hit that mark everything had to come together just right. If, by chance, everything came together 55 times in a row, he could theoretically hit 26 feet 55 times in a row.
Finally, with respect to the qualitative/quantitative argument you make, I’m just not following you.
Oh for God’s sake.
YES. Of course there’s some friggin luck invloved. Just as there is an element of pure athleticism involved. Instead of athleticism, let’s call it capacity. Just as someone with no arms won’t be able to hit a baseball, you need some level of inherent capacity in order to perform this task. All the adjustments he makes are within his own sphere of judgment. If he screws up, he’s gonna miss the ball. So there’s a balance that’s being struck at all times between the capacity of the sportsman/athlete and the external factors around him that have to come together just right in order for this accomplishment to occur.
The same is true of a long jump. Just as Beamon had the capacity to perform his exercise (i.e. the muscle tone, the skill, the bravery whatever etc.), other external factors had to come into play (by random chance) in order for him to excel his limits. I don’t understand why its so hard for you to accept the fact that luck will invariably have to play its part in all of these athletic accomplishments. If you are willing to accept that there is an element of luck involved in Dimaggio’s performance, why the heck is it so inconcieveable to think that there is some on the part of Beamon’s jump?
You said that we should attempt to categorize the different fields of sports so that we could (essentially) distinguish between those sports that require “luck” and those which are more “athletic”. I was meerly arguing that our ability to do this would be based on way too many factors that would come under scrutiny once we began attempting this categorization. For this reason, I am not bothered in trying to bring in qualitative aspects of sports. I’m simply talking about the statistics that make individual sportsman in thier respective fields stand out.
Sam Stone are there any studies conducted like the one you mention? I ask because your example reminds me of something I read about (I think it was either in Physics World or a statistical journal) that measured the precision (as in the amount of times a hole-in-one was achieved by a selection) of unfamous golfers. Like you mention the tail-enders are the ones who stuck out and were exceptional.
In fact I do accept the fact that an element of luck was all part of Beaman’s feat. I thought I was clear on that. Here is what I said:
It was luck that brought everything together at that moment. That plus his physical abilities sent him through the air for 26 feet. It would be luck on top of luck for it to happen 55 times in a row
England beating Australia at Headingley (Leeds, Yorkshire, England) in 1981.
At one point the odds were 500/1…
Although off the OP, Gail Devers would be up there with him.
Yes, and Dennis Lillee and at least one other player (Rod Marsh?) put a “laffer bet” against their own team during the match.
Nothing suspicious there, eh? :dubious:
No.
That’s true, although anyone who watched the match knows that they still did their utmost to win.
This is borne out, at least for Lillee, in the statistics:
Bowling:
1st: 4/49
2nd: 3/94
Total: 7/143
Batting:
1st: 3 not out
2nd: 17 (third best total in a dismal Australian performance)
People generally dismiss Joe DiMaggio’s streak as untouchable. I was wondering if my theory is correct here:
In 1941, Joe D. played 139 games, got 541 AB, and 193 H
He averaged 3.892 AB per game, and his BA was 0.356747
I compute his chance of getting a hit in a single game that year as:
1-(1-0.356747)^3.892 = 0.8204. So in any given game,Joe had 82%+ chance of a hit.
To hit in 56 straight games, the probability is:
0.8204^56 = 0.000015363 or 1 in 65,092.
So for a guy who can hit .357, the chances are 1 in 65,000+. Doesn’t seem to be completely impossible, but quite unlikely.
Are these numbers and approach reasonable?
Looks reasonable to me. Now the next thing you should do is figure out how many chances a player has in a given year to do this. In other words, once a player doesn’t get a hit in a game, the streak starts over. So you really get quite a few opportunities in a given year. Finally you need to figure out how many players there are in a season, because they all have a shot at the record. Once you plug in all of that the odds will diminish significantly, but the feat will still be impressive.
For more than 20 years, George O’Leary held the most improbable football record of all time – lettering without being on the team. But the record was only discovered after hired as head coach at Notre Dame:D