Suppose you were able to clone a copy of the New York Yankees, and play the cloned team against the real one. Just by random chance alone, your team might go 85–77, or 80–82, or even 69–93. But for any individual season, the record may vary significantly from 81-81. You’d expect, on average, to get 81 wins and 81 losses.
Each time it lands heads, that’s a win, and when it lands tails, that’s a loss. Suppose you take a coin and flip it 162 times to simulate a season. 34 (2005).Ī team’s season record is massively influenced by luck. This article was published in SABR’s Baseball Research Journal, Vol.
