The champ isn't always the best

July 30, 2007— -- In a bleak season for New York Yankees fans, science offers some solace: The wrong team, the Florida Marlins, beat the Yankees in 2003's World Series, a study finds.You may wonder, along with Yankee owner George Steinbrenner, how this injustice could occur.

"The world of sports provides an ideal laboratory for modeling competition because game data are accurate, abundant and accessible," researchers explain in the journal Physical Review E. "Even after a long series of competitions, the best team does not always finish first."

The problem, say study authors Eli Ben-Naim and Nick Hengartner of the Los Alamos (N.M.) National Laboratory, is that the baseball season, at 162 games, is too short. Instead, the number of games that would keep a lucky-but-lousy team from dethroning a statistically superior team is 265.

"Baseball actually isn't doing too bad a job compared to other leagues," says Ben-Naim, a statistical physicist. "Probably the worst is the National Football League with only 16 games in a season."

The researchers, who specialize in studying random behavior in complex materials, plugged the odds of low-seeded teams beating high-seeded ones, 44% in baseball over the past century, into a mathematical model of a typical season.

The more games played, the better the chances are that the higher-seeded teams will become champions, the study shows. Tournaments and one-game series are particularly likely to produce Cinderella winners.

"Of course, lots of people like to see these kinds of winners. That's why we have March Madness," the National Collegiate Athletic Association's basketball tournament, Ben-Naim says.

But to ensure that the best Major League Baseball team wins, a longer World Series, say 11 games, would be mathematically appropriate. "The same is true for other competitions in arts, science and politics," the study's authors write.

A more efficient competitive process would be to schedule a preliminary series of competitions to cull the obviously bad teams and then follow with a longer season devoted to only the good ones.