Month: October 2021

Expected number of all-Confederate World Series

The World Series starts today. Atlanta vs. Houston. This is wrong for multiple reasons:

  • the Astros are cheaters
  • the Astros are a National League team
  • as a native Philadelphian, I’m obligated to hate the Braves, even though I moved to Atlanta
  • these are warm-weather teams and part of the fun of the ridiculously late postseason is that it’s not really baseball weather, but I just went for a walk and it’s pretty nice out.

Nathaniel Rakich observed that this is the first-ever World Series between teams from the former Confederacy. This surprised me! But there are only five teams in the former Confederacy, out of 30 in MLB (29 of which are in the US). In chronological order of formation, they are

  • the Houston Astros (NL 1962-2012, AL 2013-present)
  • the Atlanta Cobb County Braves (NL 1966-present, moved from Boston)
  • the Texas (Dallas-area) Rangers (AL 1972-present, moved from Washington)
  • the Florida/Miami Marlins (NL 1993-present)
  • the Tampa Bay Devil Rays (AL 1998-present)

In particular Missouri never seceded, which matters quite a bit here because the St. Louis Cardinals have been in the World Series the second-most of any team.

First, a few words about Major League Baseball. There are currently two “leagues” comprising MLB, the National League and the American League. Each has 15 teams, of which one (the “pennant winner”) will make it to the World Series.

Organized baseball got started in the late 19th century, and its “classic” alignment of 16 teams were all in northern cities, since there were few large southern cities at the time. From 1903 to 1952 the teams were located as follows: Boston x2, Brooklyn, Chicago x2, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Detroit, New York x2, Philadelphia x2, Pittsburgh, St. Louis x2, Washington. In 1953-1972 a bunch of teams moved but since then MLB has mostly grown via expansion.

The former Confederacy is still is underrepresented in MLB – it has population of about 108 million, compared to the US population of 331 million, so it “ought” to have nine or ten teams. Or, if you’re going to argue that an MLB team has to be in a big city, nine of the thirty largest metropolitan areas are in the former Confederacy. (In order, they’re Dallas, Houston, Miami, Atlanta, Tampa, Orlando, Charlotte, San Antonio, and Austin. The first five have teams, and I believe the latter four have been thrown around as expansion candidates.) So although historically the country’s big cities may have been in the north, this is less true now.

Given the historical locations of the teams, how many all-Confederate World Series would we expect? We start counting in 1972, when the American League got its first team in the former Confederacy.

yearsNL teams in former ConfederacyNL teams totalAL teams in former confederacyAL teams total
1972-76 (5)2 (Houston, Atlanta)121 (Texas)12
1977-92 (16)212 114 (+Seattle, Toronto)
1993-97 (5)3 (+Florida)14 (+Florida, Colorado)114
1998-2012 (15)316 (+Arizona, Milwaukee)2 (+Tampa Bay)14 (+Tampa Bay, -Milwaukee)
2013-21 (9)2 (-Houston)15 (-Houston)215 (+Houston)
Table of team counts in former Confederacy and overall, by year

So for example, in each of 1972-76, the chances of both pennant winners coming from the former Confederacy were 2/12 x 1/12 = 2/144. With the current alignment it’s 2/15 x 3/15 = 6/225.

The expected number of all-Confederate World Series is

5 x 2/12 x 1/12 + 16 x 2/12 x 1/14 + 5 x 3/14 x 1/14 + 15 x 3/16 x 2/14 + 9 x 2/15 x 3/15 = 0.978

which is honestly lower than I expected! But it’s only fairly recently that there have been an appreciable number of MLB teams in this part of the country, and the fact that you need teams from both leagues to get through really keeps this number down.

Which countries are better at the Winter Olympics than the Summer Olympics?

From Reddit (posted by u/RoadyHouse): Which Olympic Games are these European countries the best?

This is a map which shades countries:

  • blue if they’ve won more gold medals in the Winter Olympics than the Summer Olympics
  • yellow if they’ve won more gold medals in the Summer Olympics than the Winter Olympics
  • red if they’ve won no gold medals

The only blue countries are Norway, Austria, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein. These certainly seem like a wintry set of countries (one of the big tourist attractions in Oslo is the ski jumping hill) but surely, say, Sweden should be on here? Or the Dutch with the speed skating? Or Canada? Do they even have summer there?

(A side note about that ski jumping hill – you can take the subway to it. But then you have to climb up a hill to get there! This is obvious in retrospect – of course the ski jumping hill would be on a hill! – but it was still exhausting. Also, they don’t really explain why ski jumping is a thing. I assume it involves young men and alcohol.)

The answer is that there are just a lot more events in the Summer Olympics than the Winter Olympics (and the Summer Olympics have been going on longer). So there have been 5,121 gold medals awarded all-time in the Summer Olympics but only 1,062 in the Winter Olympics, according to the all-time medal table at Wikipedia.

Consider for example Sweden. They’ve won 148 summer gold medals out of the total of 5,121, or 2.89% of all summer gold medals.

They’ve won 57 out of the 1,062 winter gold medals, or 5.36% of all winter gold medals.

So it’s reasonable to say that Sweden is better at the winter Olympics than the summer Olympics. If you wanted to put a number on it, 5.36%/2.89% = 185% so you could say they’re 85% better at winter than summer.

If I’ve done it right, the list of countries that are better at the winter Olympics than the summer Olympics are, in order from most: Liechtenstein (their only gold medals ever are in winter), Austria, Norway, Switzerland, Canada, Belarus, Czech Republic, Netherlands, Germany, Finland, Estonia, Sweden, South Korea, Russia, Slovakia, Croatia, East Germany, Slovenia, Latvia.

Do you like maps? Here that is as a map.

I’m not surprised that this list is so Eurocentric. The Soviet Union, West Germany, Italy, and France just barely miss it. (I haven’t made any effort to merge together the various Germanies, or deal with the Soviet Union and its various successor states.). Many Winter Olympic sports have a high barrier to entry just in terms of what facilities are available – to take an extreme example there are only fifteen luge tracks in the world – and lots of countries just don’t have enough winter to have winter sports. So this is essentially a map of rich, cold countries. As one reporter put it during the 2018 Olympics, “From a sports perspective, Norway is rich as shit“.

Mountains help too – Denmark has 48 summer gold medalists but no winter gold medalists. Maybe the Danes should take up speed skating like the Dutch.

(This post originated as a Reddit comment. Map made using mapchart.net.)