Re: Stats Gone Wild! Plus Triple-Play Bonus

On Thu, 15 May 2008 22:02:35 -0500, "ZBicyclist"
<ZBicyclist@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:


>> Wait.  Where are the "boring details below"?  I LOVE boring 
>> baseball
>> simulation details.
>
>The boring details were below my sig line. I'll repeat them here:
>

My newsreader deletes everything below the sig line.

>Boring details:  I ignored baseball expansion [which creates more 
>games in a season] and treated each year
>as an entity.  Based on the fact that there are 14 occurrances in 
>108 years, I estimated a poisson mean of .129 per year. Then each 
>year can have 0, 1, 2, etc. triple plays based on that poisson mean.
>Once 108 years are simulated, it's a simple matter to count the 
>largest string of zero years (which can be any set of years, not 
>just 1928-1967).
>
>I did this 2,000 times, which is enough to get the idea that this is 
>rare but not terribly impossible under random cir***stances.
>
>> Without seeing your simulations, though, if you
>> had to simulate 2000 seasons [actually 2000 sets of 108 seasons] 
>> to produce just 8 examples of a 41-year
>> gap, that's highly improbable to have occurred by chance, only a 
>> 0.4%
>> probability.
>
>Right. I characterized it as "rare but not terribly impossible", 
>which is in the same ballpark.
>

Thanks for the boring details.  I do think that the odds of just one
occurrence in 68 years is much, much smaller than the one gap of 41
years.  It would require looking at every possible 68 year period,
which would be a bit of a complex analysis, agreed.

-- 
M C Hamster  "Big Wheel Keep on Turning" -- Creedence Clearwater Revival