Just to give everyone a little bit of a break from the 2010 midterms, here’s an interesting question regarding America’s other pastime. With the “Giants victory in Game 4”:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/01/sports/baseball/01game4.html?_r=1&ref=sports of the World Series yesterday on his mind, my colleague “Peter Rosendorff”:https://files.nyu.edu/bpr1/public/ was wondering why it seemed like so many World Series went to 7 games. After a brief lunch time conversation with Monkey Cage contributors “Sandy Gordon”:http://politics.as.nyu.edu/object/sanfordgordon and “Pat Egan”:http://politics.as.nyu.edu/object/PatrickEgan and some preliminary analysis, we noticed a clear puzzle: there are not enough 6 Game World Series. Peter writes:
bq. We simulated a model in which evenly matched teams were pitted against each other 10 000 times. As can be seen in the table below, 12.53% of the time, the series ends in 4 games. Notice that the fraction of times a series goes to 6 or 7 games should be, on the basis of purely random reasons, approximately equal.
bq. However, looking at the actual data (below) from 98 World Series (starting in 1903, and dropping years in which there was no World Series or the format was different (9 game series, or ties were permitted)), we see that there are too few 6-game series and too many 7-game series. This variation may just be the result of random draws; or it may indicate something systematic. Option 1 is that conditional on having reached the 6th game, the possibility of leaving what must be huge TV and other revenues from a 7th game on the table is just too large for the teams to forgo – and they tacitly collude; alternatively, after having reached a 3-2 score, the team having just won is too exhausted to finish the job. Any other suggestions?
bq. By the way, by relaxing the assumption of evenly matched teams, we should see even fewer 7 game series, and more 4 and 5 – this is more or less what we do see. But it heightens the mystery of the missing 6-game series.
The one thought I had was that maybe this had something to do with the travel day between Games 5 and 6. It would be interesting to see how many of those 7 game series mimicked the “1986 World Series”:http://www.metacafe.com/watch/2910082/bill_buckner_play_1986_world_series/, where the Mets returned home down 3-2 only to win the last 2 at home. Maybe teams who have the three home games in the middle of the series are more likely to be winning 3-2 after 5 games in series that go more than 5 games, and then also more likely to lose that first game (game 6) on the road, thus leading to the 7 game series.