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.
It's a new year, time to reconsider the old and start afresh. In that vein, today begins a wintertime series of discourses on common baseball misconceptions currently in the possession of most baseball fans and media.
You can probably guess some of the subject matter. RBIs are not king. Speed is not the top quality for a leadoff hitter. Most of what you think is "clutch" is just luck or timing. Analyzing playoff series game-by-game is a fool's errand. Players don't win championships; teams do. Managers hardly matter. Pitching wins are such a weak barometer of pitching quality that we should cease tracking them. Et cetera, et cetera (which is not pronounced eck-setera.)
Today, maybe the single most important concept: the ascendancy of luck.
Luck is ubiquitous, significant and often determinative. This is true not just in sports. Luck is the reason both George W. Bush and Barak Obama attained the presidency. Imagine how their scenarios might have changed had the weather in Florida or the overall economy been different on election day. Luck gave a marginal talent like Tom Brokaw the opportunity to reach the top of TV news while far better journalists and broadcasters toiled elsewhere for far less money. Fitness guru Jim Fixx lost his life to bad luck. Good luck has kept the rest of us alive.
Luck is a factor on every play of every baseball game. A gust of wind, a bad hop, a fortuitous carom, a close call, an aggressive fan, a freak injury, a quarter-of-an-inch when bat meets ball: any one of these can affect the outcome. If you want to find an over-performing team, find one that wins a pile of one-run games. The pundits will say they're "clutch," but they're generally lucky. The proof is, those teams have lesser records the following year. Conversely, teams that lose close contests in bunches over a season tend to improve their performance the next season.
That's not to say that skill, hard work, practice and dedication are irrelevant; they are so important that no matter how many times I bat against Johan Santana, I will never homer off him. (However, I'm quite likely to run home.) In the Major Leagues, where every player and every team is magnificently skilled and focused, the five percent of the game that luck inhabits can make all the difference in the world.
Branch Rickey said luck is the residue of design. This is nonsense perpetrated by lucky people. Rickey himself had the massive good fortune to be born white and rich in America. Certainly people who work hard and smart exploit the good breaks and overcome the bad ones better than those who don't. But no measure of ability or commitment could have catapulted Jackie Robinson's father to Branch Rickey's career.
In the course of a baseball season, serendipity visits every player in one form or another. One hitter's bloops drop in, while another's line drives get caught. These natural vicissitudes add up to what the seamheads call BABIP -- batting average on balls in play. (In other words, not counting strikeouts, walks, HBP and home runs.) Some of BABIP is skill -- how hard you hit the ball and how fast you run can affect it -- but BABIP fluctuates as much as 100 points after accounting for those things.
That 100 points is primarily luck. The same is true for pitchers. In 1999, after his amazing seven-year run, Greg Maddux surrendered 39 more hits than innings and his ERA spiked 50%. Asked what happened, Maddux shrugged that the balls being hit off him were just falling in and that it would even out. Sure enough, in 2000 Maddux threw 30 more innings and relinquished 33 fewer hits as his ERA dropped 57 points. One reason Maddux was so transcendent is that he intuitively understood the hidden skills of pitching.
On average, luck evens out. On average, the wind blows 10 mph. But sometimes it's a hurricane and sometimes the air is still. Most players live in the fat part of the bell curve, but a handful spend a whole season shacking up with Lady Luck while another handful endure her year-long enmity. Total it up and you can see how a player who bats .280 with 20 home runs one year is the same one who bats .250 with 14 or .310 with 26 the next, or a pitcher with a 4.00 ERA one year is the same as one with a 3.40 or 4.60 the next. In fact, these are rather conservative examples.
Now multiply that by team. Whole clubs have enjoyed a heaping teaspoon of nature's smiles that lead to victories in the close games and hot runs through the gauntlet to the World Series. The players, coaches, media and fans can be forgiven for seeking ex post facto reasons for their success -- "chemistry," commitment, team effort -- when a simpler but less morally uplifting explanation is obvious. As King Charlemagne is given to say in Pippin, "It's smarter to be lucky than it's lucky to be smart."
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. 
