Goal Posts

Commentary on the complex relationships between motivation, performance, competition, cooperation, and goals.

by John Tauer

1/4096= Odds of losing 12 straight playoff games

Twins Lose to the Yankees….Again.

Published on October 9, 2010 by John Tauer, Ph.D. in Goal Posts

Sports fans are attuned to the concept of being in the zone, or being ‘hot'. Whether it is a basketball player, football quarterback, or a baseball player, we love to predict who will succeed and who will fail. Several years ago, Tom Gilovich and his colleagues published a paper refuting the concept of the hot hand, essentially showing that the best predictor of any given shot in basketball is a player's overall shooting percentage. This paper did not find support for the notion of the ‘hot hand', a phenomenon endorse by many basketball coaches, players, and fans alike.

At the team level, there is evidence that the best predictor of a team's playoff performance is their regular season record. Thus, it makes little sense when a team's performance is drastically different than their regular season record.

This is particularly the case in baseball, where the majority of teams who qualify for the playoffs have similar records. In 2010, the records of the teams who made the playoffs ranged from winning percentages between .599 and .556. This 4.3% difference between the best and worst team qualifying for the playoffs is smaller than that of the NFL (.875 vs. .563 for a 31.2% difference, NBA (.744 and 500 for a 24.4% difference).

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As a result, we would expect that the results of major league baseball playoff series would be unpredictable due to the minor differences between regular season records. How is it then, that the Minnesota Twins have lost 12 straight playoff games, including 9 straight to the New York Yankees. Assuming the Twins are an even match for their opponents, the odds of losing 12 straight games is 1 in 4,096 (1 in 2 to the twelfth power)! Streaks in performance are fascinating, because they seem to belie what logic and evidence would predict.

What are some of the explanations for this losing streak? Lack of confidence? Negative expectations? Superiority of the Yankees? Bad Luck? Random chance?
What can the Minnesota Twins do (or what could they have done) to break this playoff cold streak?

References
Gilovich, T., Vallone, R. & Tversky, A. (1985). The hot hand in basketball: On the misperception of random sequences. Cognitive Psychology 17, 295-314.