Quote:
Originally Posted by Long_Long_Name
I remember calculating the odds, roughly, that a player would get a 56-game hit streak. I got around once every 125 years, I think. But, I did that years ago, it might not have been very good.
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This is something I wrote about in my blog a couple of years back, about the likelihood of a 56-gamer. This bit of maths is from Stephen Jay Gould's book, Triumph & Tragedy in Mudville -
Ed Purcell's [a nobel-laureate in Physics] calculations determined that for it to have been a statistical likelihood for a 56-game hit streak to occur (probability of better than 0.5), then baseball would need (up to the point that the article was written, 1988) to have had either four .400 career hitters (there are none), or 52 hitters with a lifetime mark of .350. In fact only three players have achieved that - Ty Cobb (.367), Rogers Hornsby (.358) and Shoeless Joe Jackson (.356). Speaking from a mathematical standpoint, Joe's streak simply should not have happened.
Thats why I reckon we're not going to see Joe D's streak matched anytime soon. If ever.
Here's the link if you want to read my whole entry (its on my blog's old home).