Physics cries foul in 2003 World Series

— -- Amid a bleak season for New York Yankees fans, science offers some solace — the wrong team, the Florida Marlins, beat them in 2003's World Series, finds a study.

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," answers the study 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 a mere 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 study authors, who specialize in studying random behavior in complex materials, plugged the odds of low-seed teams beating high-seed ones, 44% in baseball over the last century, into a mathematical model of a typical season.

The more games played, the better the chances that the higher seeded teams will become champions, according to the study. And it becomes less likely that a weak team will weasel its way to the top.

Tournaments and one-game series are particularly likely to produce Cinderella winners, for the same reason. "Of course, lots of people like to see these kinds of winners, that's why we have March Madness," Ben-Naim says, referring to the National Collegiate Athletic Association's championship basketball tournament.

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," write the study authors.

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.

"In real life, we have to compete all the time, rank people, rank proposals and other things," Ben-Naim says. The study suggests a more efficient approach in such cases would be to throw out the worst competitors immediately and "spend all your energy evaluating only the few obviously best ones."

Tough luck for the Marlins in that case. Statistics indicate they were the worst team in 30 years to win a World Series, say the authors.

Each week, USA TODAY's Dan Vergano combs scholarly journals to present the Science Snapshot, a brief summary of some of the latest findings in scientific research. For past articles, visit this index page.