And incredibly, the person’s name was not Manny Acta. After the first 10 or 12 defeats, wouldn’t the writing be on the wall? Unless you’re planning to fuck, marry or kill Cristian Guzman (above), is there any excuse for this sort of behavior? The Wall Street Journal’s Carl Bialik considers the case of Nationals fans Stephen Krupin, who recently told DC Sports Bog’s Dan Steinberg he’d witnessed 19 Washington home games in 2009 and hadn’t seen a single victory (links swiped from Repoz and Baseball Think Factory).
Suppose that the Nats had a 40.7% chance of winning any given home game. Then the probability of seeing 19 straight losses would be 48/81 to the 19th power, or one in 20,800. Or suppose that the Nats™ 33-29 performance in the 62 games Krupin missed was truly indicative of the team™s quality. Then the probability was an infinitesimal one in 1.86 million.
œThey are two slightly different calculations. [One in 20,800] is the chance of seeing 19 straight occurrences of an event that happens with probability .6. [One in 131,204 is] the probability of happening to choose 19 losing games from 81 with 48 known losses among them, Hal Stern, a statistician at the University of California, Irvine, said. œThe second is a nice retrospective question (given this series of outcomes how could someone have been so unlucky). The only caveat to either number is that they are essentially asking the probability that a specific person sees 0-19, not the probability that someone in Nat Nation would have this experience. You need to know how many Nat fans went to 19 or so games, which makes it not so unusual. (This is akin to the difference between a person winning the lottery twice in a year and you winning the lottery twice in a year.)