You feelin lucky, punk?

[sveumrules]

Whether it's BABIP, ERA, W/L record, injuries, or any other litany of things it is becoming increasingly obvious to most forward thinking baseball fans that LUCK is a tremendous factor in determining the outcome of any player and/or team's season.

 

That said, how does this knowledge effect your enjoyment of baseball in general?

 

[jerichoholicninja]

As a pitcher it ticks me off. I can throw a perfect pitch in a perfect spot and a guy can take a crappy half swing and it barely squeaks through the infield to score a runner from second with two outs. What did I or anyone else on my team do wrong? Nothing but it cost us a wrong.

[sveumrules]

Or you can groove a fastball down the pipe and the batter just misses it and pops out to 2B.

This is another aspect of LUCK that I find interesting. It seems like people have a longer memory/higher recognition of bad LUCK events as opposed to good LUCK events which are often forgotten shortly after they happen or never recognized as such in the first place.

For instance, Counsell bloops a double down the LF line. Most people will attribute that to him being a gritty veteran battler who willed his way to a hit, when in most likelihood he just got LUCKY.

[jerichoholicninja]

Oh ya. I totally agree about the other side of luck. Baseball is so much about the right things happening at the right time and in the right place.

[cwolf2012]

Luck is a big part of any sport. In a game of such low percentages, it's magnified. Part of it frustrates me, and part of it intrigues me.

 

It allows me to at least utilize a bit of my mathematical background on actual numbers. That's nice too.

[Oxy]

I don't think any of those instances would be considered luck--perhaps the weak ground ball through the hole. Luck would be crushing a high fly ball to left center when a big gust of wind blows it back to be caught on the warning track--or the opposite, a pop fly being pushed out for a home run.

 

Sports is not a roll of a 234895784 sided die. It's people interacting. If a player makes a great swing on a great pitch, that's making the most of the moment. Perhaps he "guessed" that it was a fastball on the outside corner, or perhaps he knew the pitcher's trends and made an educated guess, which is far from luck. Luck has to be purely that, luck. Just because something unpredictable happens doesn't necessarily mean it is luck. In these days of computers and sabermetrics, we are quick to ascribe anything that we can't readily explain from past events as being luck. It's just not true.

[cwolf2012]

I think, by your definition Oxy, there is NO luck at all. Perhaps the pitcher knew that wind gusts would be picking up, and knew the hitter would try to pull the ball on a certain pitch and forced him to hit it into the wind.

 

Trying to quantify what amounts to random events really doesn't help at all in a predictive sense at all, so it's far better from a predictive sense to treat these instances as "luck" than some sort of formula of completely unquantifiable and unknowable causes.

 

EDIT: To quote myself in another thread:

 

"but rather a complex system of variables which is incredibly

difficult to quantify yielding a result that appears to be random on the

surface"

 

Not to cherry pick your post too much, but this is essentially luck. I

agree that the situations had specific variables that are absolutely

unquantifiable or predictable that led to the specific (if inevitable)

outcome that is based 100% on those specific circumstances. It's called

determinism in philosophy.

 

Instead of trying to act like those variables can be controlled or

manipulated, it's much much easier to refer to that as "luck."

[rluzinski]

If you believe that the result of a die roll isn't really luck, then then you are going to believe that baseball isn't about luck either. It then becomes a useless semantical argument. When I refer to luck in baseball, I have probability theory in mind. These guys AREN'T robots, so even if everything is exactly the same, a guy isn't always going to throw his pitch the same, the batter isn't always going to take exactly the same swing, a fielder isn't always going to take get the same jump and on and on. So, you don't predict that batter A will ALWAYS get a hit against pitcher B, even if you know EVERYTHING about the situation. Batter A has a certain probability of getting a hit.

 

All sports of luck in it but frm game to game, baseball sure has a lot of it. It's why they really need 162 games to even things out. If they playedf 16 games, the odds of the best teams making the post season would plummet.

[Oxy]

I think, by your definition Oxy, there is NO luck at all. Perhaps the pitcher knew that wind gusts would be picking up, and knew the hitter would try to pull the ball on a certain pitch and forced him to hit it into the wind.

 

Trying to quantify what amounts to random events really doesn't help at all in a predictive sense at all, so it's far better from a predictive sense to treat these instances as "luck" than some sort of formula of completely unquantifiable and unknowable causes.

 

EDIT: To quote myself in another thread:

 

"but rather a complex system of variables which is incredibly

difficult to quantify yielding a result that appears to be random on the

surface"

 

Not to cherry pick your post too much, but this is essentially luck. I

agree that the situations had specific variables that are absolutely

unquantifiable or predictable that led to the specific (if inevitable)

outcome that is based 100% on those specific circumstances. It's called

determinism in philosophy.

 

Instead of trying to act like those variables can be controlled or

manipulated, it's much much easier to refer to that as "luck."

I agree with most of what is said here--the problem I have is blurring the distinction between what is statistically determined as "luck" because of the complexity of the variables (which you nicely quoted above), with ACTUAL luck. For statistical purposes it makes sense to use the term "luck" in many instances. However, I don't really think it makes sense to ascribe "luck" to any particular individual outcome on the field. It comes into play sometimes with weather and bad hops, etc. But just because something unlikely happened (say, Jason Kendall hitting a bomb off of Roy Halladay) doesn't make it luck. Further, the more that something "unlikely" or "lucky" happens, the LESS lucky it actually was in the first place! Things are constantly changing and probabilities are constantly changing so that what once could be considered "luck" may actually have a very rational explanation.

[rluzinski]

What is actual luck?

[Tedaldtada]

This thread, in my humble opinion, is the best one on the entire site. I only took one college stats class, so much of this is wayyy over my head, but, the simplicity in how rluzinski describes his points make this a must read.

 

I work in the agricultural odor mitigation field, and often times, we encounter complex systems with many, many variables. One example I am currently working on involves swine finishing barns in my area. Some of this units are experiencing really bad 'foaming' in their manure pits. So bad, that the foam is rising through the slats in the barn floor even. This foam is almost 80% methane, so their is a huge explosion hazard, along with the gas being poisonous to the animals and people that work there. Mass animal kills, human casualties and explosions have happened recently, seemingly with more frequency. Now here comes the crazy part. We have been on swine finishing sites that have multiple buildings housing animals. The buildings were built at the same time, are the same size, and are built with the same materials. Maintenance of each building is the same. There are the same amount of pigs in each building. The pigs eat the same diet, and drink the same water. The pigs in each building are on roughly the same grow schedule. For space reasons, manure had even been transferred between the two pits, so there has been ample mixing of microorganisms, nutrients, etc. That shouldn't even matter though, because the two pits/diff. kind of manures should be the same (and they do test that way in the lab). Despite all that, one building will have severe pit foam, and the other will have no pit foam problems to speak of.

 

I just thought that story was interesting because of the discussion here in this thread. Everything is the same, yet we encounter different results. The beauty of statistical luck. http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/smile.gif

[jerichoholicninja]

I think when people think of luck they think of picking some random numbers and winning millions of dollars in the lottery. Clearly no skill involved. When I think of baseball luck I think of what happens when the ball leaves the bat. It is a skill to throw a pitch that is difficult to hit solidly. However, once the ball is hit the pitcher's skill is meaningless. A pitcher getting a ground ball just to the left of second base with a runner on third is a run scoring hit. However, that same ball with a runner on first is very likely a double play. Luck in baseball is about situation, where the ball is hit, field conditions and dimensions, other players and umpires making a mistake, scheduling, and other things I'm failing to mention. The "luck" involved in baseball is mind boggling.