The Cleveland Indians are great, not just lucky

BASEBALL is a sport in which it can be hard to tell the difference between lucky and good. One of the strongest arguments for maintaining the grinding 162-game schedule in North America’s Major League Baseball (MLB) is that the best teams only win around 60% of the time, and only beat the worst ones at roughly a 70% rate—meaning that very large samples of performance are needed to give the cream of the crop enough time to rise to the top. The sport’s “signal-to-noise” ratio is so low that even its most hallowed accomplishments, such as perfect and four-home-run games, can be achieved by players with relatively modest resumes.

For teams, long streaks of consecutive wins or losses tend to fall into this category. However, the Cleveland Indians, who set a new all-time record on September 14th with their 22nd straight victory—a thriller...Continue reading