Statistics...and Baseball

I don't like statistics. 

I dropped it in second year university and (Bell) curved myself into an English major, which was clearly where I belonged.

All's well that ends well.

I've never liked sweeping generalizations, which often seem like stereotyping. M used to say I dealt with everything by exception. Statistics tries to make sweeping generalizations to try to predict the future.

The only concept I mastered in Statistics was 

The Gambler's Fallacy. 

An example of this is tossing a coin for heads or tails. Most people think that, after a lot of heads tosses, the chances that there will be a tails next is more likely. This is wrong. 

Every coin toss has a 50% chance of being heads.

And 50% chance of being tails.

What happened before has no effect on what is going to happen next.

People who gamble, especially in professional sports, want to read the future by looking at the past. It comforts them to see that a horse has good breeding, has won in other races, and so on. Or that a certain hotshot baseball player (admittedly very talented and skilled) will provide the magic fairy dust for a team every time. 

But a team is just that: a group of people working together. Using Psychology terms there are too many unknown variables to predict accurately. Any player can get injured. Any player can drop out because he hasn't recovered fully from a past injury. Something could affect a player's mood. The order of the lineup has to be matched to the other team's. And so on...

It's useless to look backwards to predict the future.

You might as well use a Magic Eight Ball.

https://www.mysticmag.com/magic8ball/

Oh, by the way,

Go Blue Jays!