Luck Is Not the Residue of Design In Baseball or In Life

Branch Rickey famously said that "luck is the residue of design." Branch Rickey was a baseball man and luck is part of baseball so it's worth examination in a baseball blog.

You might have noticed that only lucky people make this statement. They want to take credit for their good fortune. Partisan politics aside, it's not possible to view the life of George W. Bush -- who screwed up in college, over-imbibed in alcohol and cocaine in his 30s, bankrupted two companies, got himself removed from a corporate board in his 40s and traded away young Sammy Sosa as president of the Texas Rangers -- without recognizing the immense power of luck. Had he been George Tree, instead of the rich scion of a politically connected family, it seems pretty obvious that he wouldn't have been accepted to Yale, installed as a corporate CEO, served on well-paying boards, been installed atop an MLB team or won election to the local zoning board, much less the presidency.

Indeed, luck and design are utterly independent. Good design can mitigate bad fortune and exploit good, but overwhelmingly bad luck will ruin all but the most adept. Even the best horse-and-buggy makers were put out of business by Henry Ford. 

Which brings us to baseball.

Tigers' third baseman Nick Castellanos, a lifetime .258 hitter, leads the American League in batting average so far this season at a .378 clip. No doubt he is hot: he's already pounded half as many home runs (7) as last year in a fifth as many at bats. He's also batting .449 on balls in play, even though the distribution of the balls he's hit is only marginally better than in the previous two seasons. 

In other words, Catellanos's grounders are dribbling through a hole. His lazy flies are dropping between charging fielders. His line drives are not getting snared. He has been lucky.

There's a fella named Pujols whose batting average (.183) is less than half of Castellanos's. He's not ripping as many line drives as Castellanos but he's killing many more worms, the kind of batted balls that metamorphose into singles at a high rate. Combine his relative turtle-speed with a snoozing patron saint of serendipity and Albert's hitting just .160 on balls in play. That's horrible luck.

Perhaps Branch Rickey would blame design, but Pujols has fanned half as many times as Castellanos, while walking twice as often. That suggests that Castellanos is just plain lucky. We should think twice, for example, before voting him to the All-Star team.

And while on average these trends will regress to middle ground, sometimes they fester all season. In 2002, Cubs infielder Jose Hernandez batted .404 on balls in play for no apparent reason en route to a .288 batting average and an All Star selection. He never again came within 50 points of OPS over a whole season and retired with a .252 batting average.

We can overcome bad luck and allow good luck to slip by unnoticed. But refusing to acknowledge its mighty influence is just silly.