wmartin@brl-tgr.ARPA (Will Martin ) (10/28/85)
If this topic has been discussed recently, please forgive -- I scanned the subjects in all the on-line postings in this newsgroup before posting this to see if it had been mentioned in the past two weeks, but didn't see anything appropriate. Since baseball fans keep lots of statistical info, I was hoping that the answer to this query would be easy for someone out there to find: I am not a baseball fan, so don't pay too much attention to it, but I have gotten the impression, over the past few decades, that World Series are more likely to last 6 or 7 games than they are to be over in four. I can accept that this is logical -- adfter all, the competing teams have to be skilled enough to have reached the top positions in their respective leagues, so it would be more likely than not that they are evenly matched. However, the conspiracy theory of life also says that this is likely to happen, because the longer the Series lasts, the more money everybody involved makes (stadia, teams, souvenir sellers, hotels, restaurants, etc.). So my query is: "What are the percentages of World Series that lasted 4, 5, 6, and 7 games?" and "Is there a trend to longer Series over time?" (that is, is a Series more likely to last longer now than the average Series lasted 20 or 30 years ago?). Thanks for your responses! (Please post them; mail to my home host has been flaky lately.) Will Martin