Today marks the first day of Major League Baseball playoffs.
So the question on every baseball fan's mind last evening was, "Who will win the World Series?"
And according to sportswriter Alan Schwarz, "Every team has a one-in-eight shot."
Schwarz led a lively discussion about baseball statistics at the Penn Bookstore last night, while promoting his first book, Numbers Game: Baseball's Lifelong Fascination with Statistics.
Schwarz, a senior writer for Baseball America, columnist for ESPN.com and contributor to The New York Times, graduated from Penn in 1990, majoring in math.
Schwarz relied heavily on audience participation, frequently asking the audience members to imagine themselves as general managers of a professional baseball team when thinking about the importance of certain statistics and the meaningless nature of others.
Throughout the discussion, Schwarz also stressed that the focus on baseball statistics is not a recent phenomenon; rather, the obsession has been around since baseball's birth in 1845.
Schwarz shared stories about individuals who played important roles in the evolution of baseball statistics. He told an anecdote about baseball statistics fanatics Charles and George Lindsey, brothers who lived in Canada and tried to use baseball statistics to formulate theories about military cost and risk strategies in the 1950s.
When describing the book, Schwarz said, "It is not a primer for how to understand [baseball] stats, but rather a history of the science of statistics from the 1840s until today. ... It's a book about the people who study stats and who are obsessed with them."
Schwarz also tried to expose prevalent misconceptions about the role of statistics in baseball. He concluded, much to the surprise of some audience members, that streaks and slumps in sports are merely coincidences, and that baseball in particular is "a game with so much randomness built into it" that he compared it to flipping a coin.
A group of about 20 people, mostly area professionals and baseball enthusiasts, came to hear Schwarz speak.
The audience appeared to enjoy the discussion.
"I thought that he was a very good speaker," said Andrew Milner, a Bryn Mawr, Pa., resident who came to hear Schwarz speak after reading his book. "I thought he explained the origin of baseball stats and the importance of certain stats over others very well."
