Weird baseball fact…

Updated on May 26, 2010 By Ken Begg 9 Comments

The Cubs and the Dodgers have both been around (at first under different names) since the 1800s.  Since they first met, they’ve played over 2,000 games against each other.

How evenly matched are they?  If the Cubs win tonight, the two teams will be exactly evenly matched over that timespan.

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  • BeckoningChasm

    Isn’t “If the Cubs win tonight” an oxymoron or something? Like a time paradox that prevents SkyNet from destroying the world.

  • Eh, they beat them last night. And even if they lose, a two-game separation after literally thousands of games played is still pretty weird.

  • Marsden

    I read that the Phillies have lost more games than anyone, ever. Beat that Cubs!

    Oh, you’re trying.

    Sorry, Ken.

  • Hey Ken!

    Let’s say that baseball is “fair”, meaning each team has a relatively equal chance of being good in one calendar year. And let’s assume the Cubs and the Dodgers have had a relatively similar payroll over the eons they’ve played. I guess that the most probably outcome would be the Vs. record approach 0.500 as the number of games increase. In fact, I hypothesize that if you took all the Vs. records the Cubs have against teams they’ve played for some time, and performed a Chi Square using a 0.500 record is a null hypothesis you would find there is no significant difference.

    The more games the teams play, the greater the chance of the Vs. schedules being close to 0.500.

    I’ll do this analysis soon…

  • Dr. K–

    I thought of that, and I’m sure you’re right, but THAT fair? Thousands of games played, and one team only one game over the other? That still strikes me as pretty strange. I’d love to see the figures, though.

  • John Nowak

    Without actually doing any of the math, yes, an even match is statistically the most likely outcome, and yes, it is very strange that the “most likely” outcome is the actual outcome.

    It’s like Mendel’s experiments — they match probability so well, it’s actually suspicious.

  • P Stroud

    Your theory of 0.500 matches is interesting but fails in the sport of Basketball. The Clippers are about 0.235 vs everybody.

  • Ok, Analysis complete!

    Analysis can be found here,

    http://home.comcast.net/~kezelepr/ChCubsAnalysis/ChCubsAnalysis.html

    The hypothesis tested was over the history of Chicago Cubs baseball, there are some teams the Cubs have been better or worse then, that is they have a Vs. record statistically significantly different then 0.500.

    Data was collected and compiled from http://www.baseball-reference.com. Thanks to Steve Sandmeyer from Seattle s KJRAM 950 sports talk radio for pointing me to this website, I know very little about baseball and did not know where to start to find the data.

    Of all they teams analyzed, only 4 displayed a statistically significant winning percentage different then 0.500. Interestingly, two of those teams are the Phillies and the Braves, two teams that the Cubs have played the most in their history. Someone who understands baseball can explain to me why the Cubs slightly but statistically significantly own the Phillies and Braves over the 100 years they have played.

  • Dr K — You are insane, and I mean that in the best possible way!